Headlines abound with the plight of endangered minority languages around the world. Read a few of these and you’ll see some common themes: the rising number of languages dying worldwide, the distressing isolation of individual last speakers, and the wider cultural loss for humanity.
These stories often mention efforts to protect such languages. This is seen as a way to buttress their speakers’ sense of identity, to resist the grinding homogenisation of globalisation, and to set right minorities’ historical marginalisation. However, these stories tend to focus less on how such efforts materially help speakers of endangered languages. As I explore in a peer-reviewed, open-access article, such efforts sometimes help, sometimes harm, and sometimes they do both at once.
