Language endangerment affects both the languages themselves and the people that speak them.
Effects on communities:
As communities lose their language they often also lose parts of their cultural traditions which are tied to that language, such as songs, myths and poetry that are not easily transferred to another language. This may in turn affect their sense of identity, producing a weakened social cohesion as their values and traditions are replaced with new ones. This is sometimes characterized as anomie. Losing a language may also have political consequences as some countries confer different political statuses or privileges on minority ethnic groups, often defining ethnicity in terms of language. That means that communities that lose their language may also lose political legitimacy as a community with special collective rights.
Effects on languages:
During language loss — sometimes referred to as obsolescence in the linguistic literature — the language that is being lost generally undergoes changes as speakers make their language more similar to the language that they are shifting to. For example, gradually losing grammatical or phonological complexities that are not found in the dominant language.
Is language endangerment a problem?
Generally the accelerated pace of language endangerment is considered to be a problem by linguists and by the speakers. However some linguists, such as the late phonetician Peter Ladefoged, have argued that language death is a natural part of the process of human cultural development, and that languages die because communities stop speaking them for their own reasons. Ladefoged argued that linguists should simply document and describe languages scientifically, but not seek to interfere with the processes of language loss. A similar view has been argued at length by linguist Salikoko Mufwene who sees the cycles of language death and emergence of new languages through creolization as a continuous ongoing process.
A majority of linguists do consider that language loss is an ethical problem as they consider that most communities would prefer to maintain their languages if given a real choice, as well as a scientific problem, because language loss on the scale currently taking place will mean that future linguists will only have access to a fraction of the world's linguistic diversity, and will therefore have a skewed picture of what human language is and can be.
Some linguists consider linguistic diversity to be analogous to biological diversity, and compare language endangerment to wildlife endangerment.
