ELL: Wall Street Journal editorial

[Joan Smith/Kocamahhul]

One economic benefit from linguistic diversity is that of cultural tourism,
as I think has been well demonstrated by the Maori/Maaori in the Rotorua
area of New Zealand. Cultural tourism can't be exploited by all linguistic
minorities, I know, but I suspect it is more likely to be a possibility for
smaller linguistic groups than larger ones.

Joan

Pierre Bancel wrote:

> I
> would however be quite interested to learn whether one
> might find an economic efficiency (either actual or
> prospective) for language diversity, in the same sense
> as it may be said of biological diversity as a
> reservoir of potentially exploitable genomes (I do not
> mean that I find this OK, only that there is a lot of
> money to make with it). I know of only very rare cases
> (and not strictly economic ones) where minority
> languages have been highly useful for major societies,
> e.g. during World War II when the US Air Force in the
> Pacific used Navajos as operators to prevent Japanese
> radiotapping (obviously a double-edged example again).
> ...

> One may expect that the one who will discover the
> economic value of linguistic diversity will (1) become
> rich (2) save thousands of languages. Will (s)he
> really divulgate it on this list tomorrow morning?
> (Thanks in advance.)
>
> Or must we concede that saving languages entails a
> non-financial view of human beings and societies and
> is contradictory with liberalism? (I have no definite
> opinion here. Once again, the question is not for me
> to know whether liberalism is bad or good, only to
> know whether or not it entails the linguistic
> uniformization of humankind.)
>
> **Regarding the interesting excursus on gastronomy.**
> Someone wrote here that most people did indeed prefer
> McDo's to grubs, otherwise McDonald's would sell
> GrubDo's (I would like to try that). I think this may
> be true only in basic economy readers, not in the real
> life. In the real life it happens quite often that you
> deprive large groups from their preferred food, cloth,
> and so on, and sell them things they don't like but
> must buy because there is nothing else at hand... To
> have killed all the buffaloes does not prove that the
> Lakota preferred cow meat and blue-jeans. And having
> the rivers and sources polluted and delivering
> undrinkable water does not prove that everyone prefers
> either Beaujolais or Coca-Cola.
>
> Best,
> Pierre
>
> ___________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!? -- Une adresse @yahoo.fr gratuite et en français !
> Yahoo! Mail : http://fr.mail.yahoo.com
> ----
> Endangered-Languages-L Forum: endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
> Web pages http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/
> Subscribe/unsubscribe and other commands: majordomo at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
> ----

--
Joan Smith/Kocamahhul
Department of Linguistics
University of Canterbury
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch
NEW ZEALAND

e-mail: j.smithkocamahhul at ling.canterbury.ac.nz
tel: 00-64-3-3667-001 ext 8321
fax: 00-64-3-364-2969


----
Endangered-Languages-L Forum: endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
Web pages http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/
Subscribe/unsubscribe and other commands: majordomo at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
----