I always liked Neal Stephenson's idea in Snowcrash: linguistic diversity keeps human culture compartmentalized, a systemic defense against dangerous memes.

That said, my feeling on the rise of machine translation is that it might, over the long run, reduce the pressure to have any sort of common language at all. At the very least, currently dominant languages (English, Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish) might fall back quite a bit. At the most, manufactured languages (more like Klingon or Elvish than Esperanto) might start to take off. Research has shown that the language you think in has an effect on your personality; one can imagine people creating languages specifically in order to enhance or suppress certain personality traits. It could be one of the great art forms of the twenty-first century.

i'm glad to see your take here. i saw another blogger sharing links about languages becoming extinct and i commented, but felt weird. i feel that this is an inevitable symptom of the democratization of information we're seeing, and so i'm not sure that it's something to be very sad about. i do see a distinction between extinctions of animals and languages.
http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/these_hills_i_see_have_names_ill_never_know/

i think it's important to explore the expansive ways we benefit from our multiple languages, but i am not a traditionalist. i see no reason to arbitrarily encourage children to learn their parents' tongues if they are interested in pursuing other interests.

I have no mixed feelings. When languages converge into one it will be ok by me.

The only time multple languages are useful ...or even fun is when one has a word for something that no other has.

Schaedenfruede. Tall Poppy.
There are dozens or hundreds of others- but not millions.

If you can say it better in Mandarin - say it. If saying it in Spanish is better - go for it. but don't tell me that having a linguistic connection to the past is an important preservation of anything but ego. Certainly not culture. English isn't even english anymore. Maybe it never was- but it surely never will be.

I have no mixed feelings. When languages converge into one it will be ok by me.

The only time multple languages are useful ...or even fun is when one has a word for something that no other has.

Schaedenfruede. Tall Poppy.
There are dozens or hundreds of others- but not millions.

If you can say it better in Mandarin - say it. If saying it in Spanish is better - go for it. but don't tell me that having a linguistic connection to the past is an important preservation of anything but ego. Certainly not culture. English isn't even english anymore. Maybe it never was- but it surely never will be.

It bears remembering that language is an artificial construct with a utilitarian purpose - allowing humans to communicate with each other, in addition to its artistic and cultural purposes.

If the utilitarian purpose is no longer served by a language, then it is no longer of value. Ideally, knowledge of the language would be preserved, so the cultural DNA, literature, and ideas are not lost (as ancient Egyptian, Latin, ancient Greek, and so on are preserved); but in the end, language serves the humans who speak it, and not the other way around. If people don't want to speak the language they were born to anymore, that's their right. One could make the same argument for any cultural artifact, really, although strictly adhering to that argument would waste an awful lot of the good we humans have created over the centuries.

-Jim