During his presentation at Pop!Tech 2008: Scarcity and Abundance, Dr. K. David Harrison discussed how language death leads to intellectual impoverishment in all fields of science and culture. He also detailed efforts to sustain, value and revitalize linguistic diversity worldwide. His talk was presented in collaboration with the multilingual video captioning site DotSub, where it is posted and now translated into 31 languages:
Closing his presentation, Dr. Harrison says “everyone can do something to support a world in which a diversity of thought and a diversity of ways of speaking is encouraged and is fostered and is sustained. There’s no reason for people to be forced to abandon their languages. It’s one of the false choices of globalization to tell people that they must give up a small or minority or a heritage language in order to speak a global language like English. It doesn’t have to happen. We would all be better and smarter if the world remains multilingual.”
If you would like to help keep the world multilingual, you can translate this video yourself. Log in to DotSub, go to the video page, and select your language from the pull down list under “Translate and Transcribe.”
