Almost continuously living species disappear from our world. And, obviously, ecologists feel concerned by this fact, and think that this is potentially calamitous for the equilibrium of our planet. But languages also quickly disappear, mainly because of economic and political factors. Some researchers assert that half of the earth’s languages will disappear in a few years. I believe we should be concerned by this decrease, just as we are concerned by the fall of species, because ethnographic wealth gets lost, as well, when a language disappears or loses its creative potential.
The degree of marginalization of languages is very different when we refer to minority languages of the so-called developed world and when we refer to marginalized languages of postcolonial countries. A language like Euskara, for example, is fortunately the object of enormous investments both economical and politics, and this merely because the Basque Country can perfectly afford it. But in most postcolonial countries this kind of investment is not an option. A lot of languages in postcolonial countries suffer the consequences of reduction of their civilizations to a caricature of ours. If there is little hope for the languages of these countries, the problem concerns also languages that are far from being minorities: “One Dream One World” is written in English (not in Chinese) on a mountain close to the Great Wall. We are allowed to ask if this unitary dream is not becoming a nightmare.