The myth of the Tower of Babel demonstrates the importance of human communication. When working on the same page and with the same tongue, humans can accomplish things that seem to threaten God himself. The way God punishes and confuses man is by severing the linguistic bond that formerly linked him to his neighbor and thus, enormous feats of cooperation are rendered infeasible.
The ancient authors of stories like this understood intimately how language can divide peoples and cultures. In the story, other languages are a curse and an impediment to cohabitation. Quite often two societies or two nations are defined as being distinct primarily for their difference of language and even if failure to communicate doesn't precipitate conflict, it certainly disables the same level of mutual edification causing a significant opportunity cost.Of course the issue is that there is a fair number of people who lend no credence to the underlying lesson of the story of the Tower of Babel. There are many people who seem to think that society is better for being divided into thousand of uncomprehending language groups.
This is usually a valuation based on a superficial type of cultural cosmopolitanism. Languages are dying quite quickly, and more and more people are picking up a language from a smaller and smaller group. With these languages die old cultural traditions and folklore, all of which are very much a curiosity to academics. Indeed it is a good habit for the studies of comparative linguistics, anthropology and sociology to document such practices before they fade from existence, but I take heavy issue with the idea that such languages or practices should be kept in existence for their own sake or for the sake of diversity or for some kind of global cultural zoo.
I enjoy studying other languages and other cultures
because knowledge of them eliminates the boundaries that they themselves
create. It is not that foreign language study should be kept around as
some kind of fun and challenging puzzle, but languages are only useful
to solve the problems they make themselves. All the more enlightening
than studying language would be a world in which studying language would
be unnecessary.
The dull conventional wisdom among armchair
moralists is to artificially keep the people of the world speaking minor
languages even when the usefulness of such tongues has long expired.
Besides being comically condescending, it totally ignores the well-being
and cooperation of these humans which is impaired by linguistic
isolation. Languages die out because their would-be speakers are better
off materially, culturally or both speaking another language. The same
applies to their cultural practices; if they wish to enter a more
international community by adopting the habits of mass-culture, so be
it.
It's painful to hear someone say that a culture or language or religion or practice has a right to exist. As fun as it is to throw around the word "right" as if it were based on more something concrete than hazy ethical feelings, this is a bit more serious as it implies a right to individuals' conscious. By saying that a language has a right to exist, it is equivalent to saying people must be compelled to speak it. People saying such things forget of the people who have a personal election to leave the culture or language of their parents in favor of one that confers to them a better livelihood or fulfillment.
We'd like to think that supporting "dying cultures"
means supporting poor, isolated communities, but in reality it means
supporting an unfeeling and ambiguous mental conception of a culture
which is only dying because its former practitioners chose to
reject it. The only way to keep such cultures and their languages alive
is to oblige people to venerate them when it obviously not in their
personal advantage to do so.