Criticism of linguistics

Language documentation

• The objectives of linguists and speakers/community members might differ
  • Linguists document languages to sustain linguistic diversity, which enables understanding to what extent languages differ from each other and to what extent they are similar (which, consequently, furthers the understanding of the cognitive foundations of language and how cultures shape language)
  • For community members, documentation of their language provides an opportunity to sustain their own endangered language
• However, in many cases the end-product of language documentation does not benefit the speakers; academic funding does not extend beyond grammar writing, and language revitalization efforts do not continue after the production of a grammar. For example, producing learning materials for the speaker communities would be beneficial.
• There is also a Western bias, and language documentation is based on well-known Indo-European languages. Whether this is the best way to approach the description of every language in the world is debatable (e.g., avoidance registers in Australian Aboriginal languages).

Academic practices

Both academic practices shared by many academic fields and practices specific to linguistics are subject to criticism from the sustainability perspective. These include conferencing, publishing, archiving and data access, research tools, and data collection.

What is language?

• Three major approaches to what language is - can linguistics as a discipline be defined if the understanding of what language is differs?
  • Generative grammar - language is an innate set of rules about grammar
  • Cognitive grammar - language is a complex interaction of concepts and cognitive mechanisms
  • Functional grammar - language evolved primarily for communication

Linguistic typology

• Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics, the purpose of which is the world-wide comparison of language structures to discover what is possible and impossible for language.

• Typologists often work with second-hand sources, which have been created for academic purposes and do not in the majority of cases contribute the speaker communities. Many language descriptions are also produced by SIL in the context of missionary work. Typologists then use these sources which may have not been produced sustainably in the first place, which challenges the sustainability of linguistic typology.
• Typological studies often include endangered languages in the sample, and as such typological research treats these languages as research objects - which raises the question on how sustainable is it include these languages, for which often only a very minimal description exists, in the studies? Would it be more important to first document these languages properly?

Spoken language vs sign language

Linguistics is biased towards considering spoken language as the standard form of language. The majority of studies which do not explicitly mention whether the research concerns spoken or signed language are about spoken language, whereas sign language research explicitly mention that the studies are of signed languages.