Linguistic diversity and language loss: A view from integrational linguistics

Abstract

This article offers an integrational linguistic critique of the way in which the notions of linguistic diversity and language loss/death are theorised within orthodox linguistics. The fundamental issue concerns the ontological status of languages. While orthodox approaches take the existence of separately identifiable languages or language varieties (lects) as a foundational theoretical postulate even in the absence of any consistent definitional criteria, from an integrational perspective languages are nothing more than second-order metalinguistic abstractions from actual language practices. Consequently, any theory of first-order linguistic diversity based on the enumeration of individual languages is automatically suspect. Furthermore, since languages do not exist as ontological realia, it cannot be the case that linguistic diversity is declining due to language loss. To suppose otherwise rests on a conflation of the linguistic and the metalinguistic, a failing endemic to orthodox linguistics. The discussion concludes by offering an integrational view on some of the epistemological and language-political issues which commonly surface in discussions of linguistic diversity and language loss. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.