A clipping from the famous movie "Arrival". The movie strictly speaks about a strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the theory of linguistic relativity
From Wikipedia
The strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories.
Linguistic philosophers like Eric Lenneberg, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker have criticized the Whorfian hypothesis and do not accept most of the inferences about language and behavior put forth by Whorf. They claim that his conclusions are speculative since they are based on anecdotal evidence and not on results of empirical studies.The strong form of the theory, be it right or wrong should produce a chance that some kind of cognitive capabilities might be lost when some languages are lost. So its safe to keep languages safe. Last time I checked new languages are not in active making, its just better to preserve the existing ones. But what happens when languages like English which are de-facto standard nowadays consume other languages. Like Indian languages. India has a very rich repository of languages, formed from very different roots. But due to lack of usage of these languages now and the failure to update vocabulary on par with the new improvements have made all our languages stagnant and require an immediate attention
Many people have responded to this. For example ICANN accepted a new list of 16 languages for domain names which does include Malayalam, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil etc... SMC ( Swathanthra Malayalam Computing ) does a lot of work in this direction to reate computing tools for Malayalam.
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