John McWhorter: evaluation

Transcript context

…— is that a social loss? Should we be concerned about that? Should we celebrate? You know, that’s a tough one, too. Here’s my real answer. My answer is not going to be that each language is a window into the souls of its speakers because, frankly, that idea is surprisingly dangerous despite all of its attractions. Because for any cool thing you can say about a language, there’s something uncool you can say about it, and you have to saddle the speakers with that as well. But the way that you be a different culture, the way that you have yourself as an entity as separate from others, is to have your own code. And it doesn’t matter how the code is built. It doesn’t matter what the shape of the words are. But if everybody just speaks what we’re speaking now, what’s really going to happen is, it’s going to be this — Portuguese, Vietnamese, Mandarin, about 25 other languages. Then several hundred will be the minority languages, and all the rest won’t exist. It means that there really is less cultural diversity because it’s harder to be a culture if you don’t have your own code. What is interesting about the language Saramaccan?…

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