Oh yeah I’m a staunch descriptivist, but I do sometimes mourn the changes that are going on in Finnish which is my native language.
Change is inevitable, especially when there are more learners whose native language is from a completely different family (which’d be the vast majority of immigrants here, Uralic languages aren’t exactly common), but it’s still a bit sad to see the language start to lose some of its unique features that have made it so expressive – but also hard as fuck to learn.
I’m a big fan of language being as useful for communication as possible for people, which means it has to evolve with the times. While it’s cool that Icelanders can still read 1000 year old documents, the fact that the language was artificially forced to stay the same doesn’t sit well with me. They can get away with it because it’s a niche language of only around 330,000 speakers, but no world language would ever survive under those kind of constraints.
As a native speaker of a relatively small language (under 6 million speakers) in a very niche language family, I understand eg. Iceland’s desire to “preserve” the language – languages are by definition communication tools, but they’re also inextricably tied to the culture(s) that produced them (and vice versa), so while I absolutely do agree that fighting change is relatively pointless, I think it’s understandable that speakers of minority languages try to protect them.
So yeah, even though I definitely am a descriptivist and know that linguistic evolution is just a fact of life, I just can’t help being a bit sad about it at the same time when it comes to Finnish. Not that I’d want to somehow “freeze” it since that’d be silly and impossible, but at the same time I’d love to see eg. promotion of some of the features that are currently dying out (whatever the hell that’d mean in practice). The primacy of English in this age of global mass media has minority languages in a real bind.
A language being closely tied to your identity is something I’ve never really experienced since my native language, English, is so widespread. I definitely agree that preservation of language is important - it doesn’t have to be keeping the language the same, but can also just be keeping track of the changes. I’ve always been fascinated by the etymology of words, and English’s word origins are very well-documented. I always assumed that it was the same in other languages that aren’t in danger of dying out - are you able look up a random Finnish word online to see where it came from?
