Why would it be a tragedy? Things change. The world is smaller.
The world will speak English in time.
Hardly a tragedy. Not even an inconvenience. As matter of fact, it's the learning of yet another language that is an inconvenience. The world is getting smaller, ties between countries - stronger. It makes no sense to cling to old ways and cultivate a village-specific language that you have noone to talk to outside.
Some parts of culture are tied to the language. Reading translated books is not the same as reading them in the original language. But it's better than not reading them at all, or spending years on learning the language (poorly.)
I would understand if humans could learn languages easily and quickly by taking a pill or sleeping a few hours under a brain programming machine. But that isn't so. Human life is short, and learning of languages is hard for most people. I know a foreign language or two, but I woudn't want to study another one at this time.
The worst part is that all the languages on Earth are basically the same in terms of usefulness for exchange of ideas. Some are a bit more verbose (French) and some are a bit terser (English) but in essence they are all adequate; that's why we can translate books. There is no human language on Earth that would be significantly better than any other for any practical purpose. English frequently wins because of its simplicity, but that's minor. There is no language, for example, that would losslessly condense a chapter from Plato into one sentence. It means that learning more languages gives you only diminishing returns.
“Meng Shujing with her grandson, Shi Junguang, and great-grandson, Shi Yaobin,.....”
Personally, I never, ever, read “news” that start with man-in-street names like this.
It’s the way of the world. They simply can’t all survive. At least we live in a time where things can be recorded and the language will not become truly “lost”.
Because of Indian languages, American has a huge amount of languages considered “critically endangered” with less than a hundred speakers. Some only have five or so speakers left. For instance, there are only about 10 speakers of Wichita left, all old folks.
Found this really interesting website. You can pop in parameters and find some interesting stuff out.
http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/index.php
I'm not sure I agree with that. When some part of a human society or culture "dies out," it's often because it simply doesn't have any functional purpose anymore as time goes on. It sounds to me as if this is the case with these eclectic languages that originated in regions that never became dominant in commerce with the outside world to the point where the language spread far and wide.
And in any case, I'd also point out that for every language that is "wiped out," we may have new ones spring up in its place even if we don't recognize it now. I was in New York City a few weeks ago and overheard a conversation between two African-American girls on the subway, and I could barely understand a word they were saying even though it was allegedly "English."