The Washington Post recently had an article entitled How the Internet is killing the world’s languages in which the author expounded that a large set of languages are passing on. Throughout the article questions like “how can this be averted”, “how can languages be save” are asked like having more than 7000 languages is a good thing.

Now I like language, and I love languages. Which is why I speak two like a native and another two to a level that I can hold an intelligent conversation. Thing is, that’s just for fun and they are all major languages. Truth be told from the perspective of benefit to the world, I don’t think more that a handful of languages are a good thing. Diversity is not a good thing in itself, nor is it a bad thing. It’s just a thing.

There is this claim that language diversity is a cause for cultural diversity. Again, so what. There are a lot of things that are expressions of culture. And we certainly don’t want to keep all of them around. Guillotines were an expression of culture, so were witch-hunts. Do we really want to insist that all diversity and all culture is a good thing?

Everything has its time and its time to end. Maybe it’s just the right time to let 7387 languages slip into oblivion.