Fragen und Antworten zum Thema Sprachensterben

Eine Sammlung von Fragen und Antworten zum Thema Sprachensterben, darunter einige Definitionen (Was ist ein Sprachendialekt?) und allgemeinere, jedoch nicht weniger interessante Fragen wie zum Beispiel:

Q. Suppose everyone woke up tomorrow fluently speaking, writing, and reading the same one language, in addition to the one(s) they now speak. […] How could it NOT be a good thing?

A. The advent of one and the same language for the whole world instead of the present diversity is both unlikely and infelicitous:

It is unlikely because it is in the nature of languages, like living organisms, to become more and more different from each other, if only because the cultural backgrounds of human societies, i.e. the backgrounds from which languages have been formed, are deeply different […]