Which is more important in your everyday life: to understand the language you speak and to recognise the intricate grammatical mechanisms that underlie it or to just speak it and hope that you’ll be understood? Let me rephrase that question. In linguistic terms, do you prize competence over performance? Do you feel that it is justified for you to spend hours on end in school learning the grammar of your native language, when you know …

“[Linguistic diversity] constitutes one of the great treasures of humanity, an enormous storehouse of expressive power and profound understanding of the universe. The loss of hundreds of languages that have already passed into history is an intellectual catastrophe in every way comparable in magnitude to the ecological catastrophe we face today as the earth’s tropical forests are swept by fire. Each language still spoken is fundamental to the personal, social and — a key term …