Chung wrote:If I want to turn my current but faintly hipsterish choice of languages into an expression of full-blown linguistic hipsterism / posturing / grandstanding / virtue-signalling / "anti-imperialism" (???), then I'd learn Meänkieli (*wink and nudge to my Finnish friends*), Northern Saami (I want payback for Norwegianism!), Meadow Mari (I'll show them Russkies!), Latvian (I'll show them Russkies! Again), and Rusyn (I'll show them Banderists!).
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To add to Iversen's and emk's posts, it's naïve (and even rather arrogant) to go in thinking that one's longstanding studying of lower-profile languages regularly and genuinely inspires others similarly to go off the beaten path linguistically. Furthermore, who am I to needle someone, even subtlely, for digging into just FIGS, Mandarin, Russian, MSA or some other big, bad colonial language, while I happily plow through less commonly-taught languages?
What you learn is an asset to yourself and a liability to no one.
I don't know what virtue signalling is (it seems 27 is now too old to be in with the 'hip crowd'), but I do know when someone reads something that isn't there. This isn't a post about linguistic imperialism, if I want to do that, I would say it clearly, nor about 'saving' languages, a term I loathe with the fire of a thousand stars, and which falls into the pathetic romanticism of a white saviour figure, but about the love of languages, if you had to choose one that has less speakers, less resources. It is an exercise in creativity. All those languages that you wanted to learn but never tried because others were more 'useful', well now they are the kinds of languages that you must learn. That is a joyous thing to indulge in.
Also, this is not a thread necessarily about endangered languages. A language doesn't have to have more than 2 million speakers to be healthy. A language can have 100 speakers and be far more healthier than one than has 6-8 million native speakers (like Quechua).