ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the moral and prudential value of preserving endangered languages. The chapter presents a range of reasons from both popular and philosophical sources as why we should care about the fact that minority languages go extinct—from the potential loss of scientific knowledge that might happen only to be captured in an endangered language to the role speaking a language plays in the self-conception of its speakers—before sketching his own view, according to which certain speech acts are only performable in a given language, and so language extinction can lead to silencing.
