Comment by Brian_K_White
5 hours ago
"is that necessarily a bad thing?"
Yes.
The value of the diversity is not just aesthetic.
Human laguage is rich and expressive, matching human thought. The diversity is part of the expressiveness. Saying something in some poetic, or merely different way, is not just an inefficient or ambiguous/confusing way of saying the same thing, it's saying something else, and that something else cannot be expressed any other way.
A crayons-only, thumbs-only, Apple one-button-only, 1000 word vocabulary world is not efficient, it's poor.
Like I said, I'm not denying the value of expressiveness at all, nor am I suggesting that anyone who values it should ever be denied the ability to express themselves as they please.
I just feel that when people talk about linguistic diversity or having a distinctive "voice," they sometimes overlook the fact that many people simply don't have a strong attachment to those things. A lot of people are primarily concerned with getting their ideas across clearly, and many already struggle with that before they even have the capacity to worry about how expressive or distinctive their language is.
I don't think that makes their use of language somehow poorer or less human. It just means they have different priorities for what they need language to accomplish.