Michael Erard
Design Observer has my piece up about David Harrison’s new book, When Languages Die:
Linguists have, in general, done a poor job of articulating why people should care that half of the approximately 6,900 languages spoken on the planet will be extinct in a century. And despite heaping scoops of truism and sentimentality atop exoticism, journalists haven’t done much better. As for me, afraid of having to dip into the sentimentality and the fetishizing of Last Things, I’ve kind of been repulsed by the topic and have never written about it.
Until now, that is.
To read the rest of the piece, go here.
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