What's so bad about dying languages?

This Washington Post article reports on "endangered languages":

[H]alf of the world's almost 7,000 remaining languages may disappear by 2100, experts say.

A language is considered extinct when the last person who learned it as his or her primary tongue dies. Last month, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched an online atlas of endangered languages, labeling more than 2,400 at risk of extinction.

Languages typically die when speakers of a small language group come in contact with a more dominant population. That happened first when hunter-gatherers transitioned to agriculture, then during periods of European colonial expansion, and more recently with global migration and urbanization. The spread of English, Spanish and Russian wiped out many small languages. ...

Extinct languages can be revived, especially when they have been recorded.

"But when you skip a generation, it's hard to pick a language back up again," said Douglas Whalen, president of the Endangered Language Fund, which gives grants to language-preservation projects. "You need a community that is really committed and will bring children up from birth in the second language, even if they themselves are not the most fluent speakers." ...

The Living Tongues Institute recruits youth who are not fluent in their traditional tongue to become "language activists," using digital equipment to document their elders' voices and learn the language themselves. This creates a record and builds pride in the language.

But wait a second — what's the point of all this? What exactly is so bad about thousands of languages becoming extinct?

The most concrete argument for preserving languages seems to be that you can preserve esoteric knowledge that's exclusive to these languages. This may be a general familiarity with the culture that speaks the lanugage, or it may be more specific — the WaPo article talks (somewhat credulously) about secret medicinal remedies passed down from generation to generation.

But if that's really our concern, does it apply only to the past? What about that other thing -- you know, the future? If we have more people speaking a larger number of languages, doesn't that make it more likely that useful information will remain confined to tiny subcultures, depriving the rest of the world of the benefits? So doesn't this concern actually cut against putting moribund languages on life support?

I'm with John McWhorter, who says:

The language revivalists yearn for — surprise — diversity. What they miss is that language death is a healthy outcome of diversity.

If people truly come together, then they speak a common language. We can muse upon a "salad bowl" ideal in which people go home and use their nice "diverse" language with "their own." But in reality, almost always the survival of that "diverse" language means that the people are segregated in some way, which in turn is almost always due to an unequal power relationship — i.e., precisely what "diversity" fans otherwise consider such a scourge.

Jews in shtetls, for example, spoke Yiddish at home and Russian elsewhere because they lived under an apartheid system, not because they delighted in being bilingual. The Amish still speak German only because they live in isolation from modern life, which few of us would consider an ideal for indigenous groups to strive for.

In the end, the proliferation of languages is an accident: a single original language morphed into 6,000 when different groups of people emerged. I hope that dying languages can be recorded and described. I hope that many persist as hobbies, taught in schools and given space in the press, as Irish, Welsh, and Hawaiian have.

However, the prospect we are taught to dread — that one day all the world's people will speak one language — is one I would welcome. Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing worldwide. There's a reason the Tower of Babel story is one of havoc rather than creation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Slippery slope.

Also, my dad says:

If people confined themselves to their "traditional" languages (and what does that mean? proto-Indo-European?) I'd be wearing today a long black coat, a felt hat, long curly earlocks, and a fringed garment, and speaking English haltingly, with a heavy accent, as a second language. I wouldn't like that. John wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't like that either.