It is considered that the government should not waste tax money to maintain the use of minority languages, whilst others disagree and think the government has to save them. While these languages have rare uses in daily life, which makes them die out again due to few speakers, making maintaining attempts a waste of resources, I believe that saving unpopular languages will help in historical documents research, revealing the hidden parts of the nation’s history.
On the one hand, many languages throughout history have died out as simpler, less complex languages have been adopted. Some attempts were made to restore these languages to the majority use, but none were successful because the majority of the population finds the language hard to use in normal conversations. For instance, the ancient Greek language was used Before Common Era and until the fall of the Hellenic city-states to the Roman Empire, replacing the majority language with Latin. Until 1983, a group of Greek historians had an ambition to restore the long-forgotten Ancient Greek, which in the end failed because modern Greek is simpler and already the major language in Greece.
On the other hand, these forgotten languages can help historians and archaeologists study ancient documents. Indeed, languages with few speakers will never be used by the majority of a nation, but they can be used for other purposes, such as discovering and analysing historic documents, which helps humanity’s purpose in searching for the hidden past. A good example of this is Latin, which has been used since the foundation of the Roman Kingdom. It was later kept and maintained by Catholic priests in Rome despite the fall of the Western Roman Empire, until the present day. They use Latin for many purposes, such as praying, worshipping, and researching documents.
In conclusion, although unpopular languages are not potentially useful for daily conversation, they do help in historical artefacts studies.
