The following information came with my "Word-for-the day" this morning. It definitely supports our desire to help our Esperanza scholars preserve their language.
If you speak English, you know a little of more than a hundred languages. That's because English has borrowed words from so many languages around the world. Through trade, conquest, colonialism, etc. it came in contact with other languages.
When two languages rub against each other, as with humans, there is a certain give and take. Languages exchange words. English has many words from Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish, but it has also borrowed from languages as obscure as Basque (chaparral), Tongan (taboo), and Shelta (moniker).
When English meets with another language, the other language usually ends up badly. That's the downside to the spread of English. It enjoys a certain prestige among languages and everyone wants to learn it. It opens more opportunities. With each successive generation, interest in one's native language declines and eventually there's no one left to speak the tongue.
That makes the English-only agitation in a few states around here ludicrous. English is alive and well and thriving. Linguistic diversity is a good thing. Already a language dies every other week, and with it a whole culture. And as anthropologist and explorer Wade Davisso well describes it, "a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules, ... but an old growth forest of the mind."
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