Below is an excerpt from Dr. Anderson’s new article, “Saving Endangered Languages Before They Disappear” which was published in The Solutions Journal, Volume 2, Issue 5, Page 76-83, June 2014.

“The 21st century will witness a decline in linguistic diversity unprecedented in history, and yet most people are unaware of it, or worse, not only don’t care, but even celebrate it. When these languages are lost, a unique window onto the mind is closed forever, and we lose one more way in which the collective human experience was conceived, and with that, one of the ways in which the human mind constructs, negotiates, perceives, and differentiates our realities is gone forever.

Speakers abandon languages in direct response to bias and discrimination, whether this is realized overtly through the explicit repression or oppression of linguistic minorities or the community of speakers that the language serves to identify as a separate group, or through more subtle covert forms of discrimination. Indigenous minority communities can thrive better economically and indeed physically if allowed to maintain their own languages in intra-community communication, and thus benefit from policies that support additive bi- or multi-lingualism, rather than subtractive monolingualism. What have proven effective in this effort are different types of official policy support and advocacy from above and grassroots activism from below.”

Continue reading article by Dr. Anderson on The Solutions Journal webpage.