Do you speak-a my language?

I said, do you speak-a my language?
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich
[Men at Work]

I came across some thread titled "Forget the Maori Language" and a comment from Greenstonegroup about this topic:

Language, Race, culture, religion is unimportant in the struggle to evolve.

language is only used for a means of communication, not a way to soul.

To hang on to something from the past is to stay in the past.

Oh no. I disagree.

Communication is much more than just "communicating". Language is a window into the soul of a people. Race is less important - in that it is just another facet of a culture, a cultural marker as it were - but a culture is indeed the essence of its people, and their language will express that essence.

How does a language evolve? Just think of the process of building language from nothing. How do people agree on the grammar? What ideas are important to express? These ideas will drive the development of their society. Language carries ideas, and those ideas carry history, learnings, strategies, understandings and is the mechanism to pass this information on. If the directive is a "struggle to evolve", then think how language makes evolution unconstrained by natural biological process so possible. If culture is the genome, language is its DNA.

Language, art, religion - all inextricably linked. And I'm going to end this post even as it begins. It's getting late. I'll finish on the point about the negative connotation around "hanging on" to something from the past - in reply I say remembering the past helps us to understand the body we have built. A decay in language and the ability to communicate is to risk errors in our replication of society's DNA. We lose sight of our cultural heritage, and cancer sets in.

Related Link: Language and Identity