thanks for your comment. But I tend to disagree. I do not argue that English is not an important world language, but in my opinion as much as English helps to bridge countries and culture, it also has clearly limitations. But of course teaching English is a first and important step get in touch with other cultures or lot more research material. One reason why I blog in English.

But if you look at indigenous knowledge for example in the field of biodiversity, there is so much valuable knowledge that you cannot easily translate into English. Furthermore if you compare the top languags in terms of people actually speaking it, then English is by far not the first language in the world. I think there is always something lost through translation, which you probably have experienced watching a dubbed movie. More importantly only if we acknowledge the richness of each language and culture, we will build real brigdes between countries.
Therefore translating everything to English is not sufficient. For example in Africa half a continent speaks French and thousands of local languages. Luckily Global Voices made some efforts to translate information for example to Suahili, spoken by millions of Africans.

Of course, any parent wanting the best chance of survival for their offspring would recommend English. If the child has a gift for language, then maybe learn another of the major languages, but forget about anything small because there never will be any return on investment learning yet another whole set of new words for the concepts that you already know. Everyone comes to the same decision, so those languages are not “threatened” with extinction, they are *guaranteed* extinction. We can run around copying them into books or making videos of native speakers but no one will read the books and no one will play the videos.

Much more useful would be if those native speakers of non-English languages would make an effort to introduce words from their language into English, but only in those cases where English has no existing word for that concept (and this is fewer cases than you think). If you feel that German is a bit more expressive for some concepts, then just use German words in the English blog. Put a hyperlink for people to research the meaning and they will catch on pretty quick.

Tscheuss!