aokoye wrote:Also none of the hipsters that I'm around (and I'm around a lot of them...sadly) are doing anything special surrounding learning other languages. In fact the only people I hear talking about linguistic imperialism are people who are directly affected by it and linguists (and "budding linguists", but even then not much). I suspect a handful of other academics do as well but given that most hipsters are generally of a specific generation you're not going to find many who have a strong foothold into the ivory tower.
You got me, I'm finishing off my Masters in linguistics XP. I do hear it from people in my department, I guess because my university has traditionally been focused on descriptive fieldwork, but it's probably safe to say that for a lot of people involved in linguistics, they think of it in the same way as a marine biologist thinks about global warming. They might be personally interested, but they might also have purely professional interest in being concerned about global warming: if global warming destroys coral reefs, what the heck do I study now!
Also, what the heck, why are there so many Australians here? We are definitely overrepresented.
But I'm a New Zealand citizen as well. Maori is one of my favourite languages just to listen to, so I would definitely pick Maori for my next one. When I grew up, my best friend was Maori, but like a lot of children of his generation, he was not raised speaking it as his primary language. You know they released a Maori dub of Moana recently, with many of the same actors coming to reprise the role? I've been listening to the soundtrack for the last couple of weeks and it's gorgeous. Here's one song, Waiata O Te Kainga.