Ipsissima Verba

The principal defining characteristic of the human race is natural language, and the diversity of its languages defines the manifest variety of human culture. Across time, however, and particularly during the last half of the twentieth century and into the present one, English has experienced somewhat of an explosion in currency across the globe, mostly through fast moving changes in geo-politics driven principally through global trade and networking via the internet. This is both good - more people can communicate through the common knowledge of one language than ever before - and bad, as minority language after minority language withers and dies along with their speakers, through lack of use and inherently limited dissemination. Most monoglot English speakers would simply say 'so what?'; these are dying languages anyway: why preserve the redundant?'. Which makes about as much sense as asking what's the point of art, literature and culture in general. 

The thing that makes us human is self-representation, something unique to our species. No other species exercises that externalisation of self through language and most particularly through self-invented culture: art and literature [via language itself] are what makes us human. From that flows everything: mathematics, engineering, the sciences; the lot. Without language we are essentially - literally - mute. So any time someone voices the notion that the only things that matter in this world are business, finance & commerce, or that the only things worth teaching our children are STEM subjects to the exclusion of all else, just mention that without language, in all all its human variety, we would have none of the things that we take so often, very glibly, for granted. Remember too, that every time a minority language is put to the sword by the all-conquering language of the English-speaking world, a little piece of humanity dies alongside it...