Welcome to this MOOC course «Language Diversity, what for?» The question «Language Diversity: What for?» is the theme of the course that I am presenting to you today. The question that we put to you is an invitation to reflect on the value of linguistic diversity, understood along with biological and cultural diversity as one of the key components of our world. The diversity of species, languages and cultures that makes our environment enormously rich and attractive, shows the infinite creativity that nature and human beings are capable of unleashing. Languages, every single language contains the landscape, the history and the emotions of their speakers. And conveys unique ways of seeing, living, understanding and describing all the wisdom of the world. Languages play a key role in people's daily life. They are the basic tool for communication, socialization and personal development. Through language we shape thought and dialogue, we argue and negotiate, that is we relate to others and we learn. Through language we build and define our identity. We tell and preserve our history. We live our traditions and customs and we create our culture. With language, we defend our rights as people, and we participate in society. Thanks to language, then we have memory. We preserve the past and we build the future. And yet, despite its incalculable value, we seem to be unable to appreciate the wealth of our world's diversity, which is why languages continue to die out at an alarming rate everywhere. According to the UNESCO Atlas of the world's languages in danger, out of around 7,000 languages spoken in the world, almost 2,500 languages are endangered or threatened. For Linguapax International, maintaining and enhancing linguistic diversity is a counterpoint to the unifying trend that is often a result of globalization. If all linguistic environments, many of them often silenced, could come to the fore, it would be easier to prevent the great expansive languages used as transnational communication codes from destroying many of these ecosystems of diversity. Ecosystems, the main value of which is to generate knowledge, knowledge with the power to transform and therefore to create culture through unique contributions to specific realities. So, we believe that a new debate in linguistic diversity needs to be promoted, to try to subvert some of the dynamics and the notions that claim that its decline is inevitable. In this course, we will look for alternative concepts that can help us to integrate languages in the way we perceive the world. That helps to improve people's living conditions by articulating spaces of linguistic justice and recognizing cultural rights instead of approaching the decline of linguistic diversity, focusing only on preservation and revitalization strategies. We will also keep in mind that languages are perceived, represented and experienced in different ways depending on the cultural context from which they emerge. Taking into account this will help us to avoid the danger of wanting to universalize certain sociolinguistic constructs, in context where languages are perceived and lived in different ways. And we will reflect on how the paradigm of human communication is being radically transformed in contemporary societies. Human movements, which have increased more than 40% since the year 2000, and the digital environment make cultural and linguistic diversity present everywhere and simultaneously. Technologies facilitate the exchange of knowledge and information in different languages. Cities are emerging as super rich cultural and linguistic environments, capable of creating new ways of communication and creation. While at the same time the role of dominant languages, especially that of global English, provokes new and diverse forms of linguistic subordination. This course will allow us to take an attentive and nuanced look at linguistic diversity. It does not aim to address in depth everything that linguistic diversity entails, but rather to be, above all, a space for communication and reflection to share knowledge and experience. We hope that it will help us to face all these challenges together and to join forces to find strategies and ways based on the expertise and experience of every one of us; that can help us to include this dimension of linguistic diversity in all our own fields of study or action. The contributions of the Linguapax International Network experts, who work for universities, organizations and bodies around the world, will offer a panoramic view and an introductory knowledge about the scope of linguistic diversity, both in terms of facts and data, and also some critical perspectives. Their reflections focus on some or on a few of many situations that exist and serve as a starting point for debating, for generating debate, exchanging experience and providing new perspectives and new interpretations on why we believe that we should carry on working to preserve this diversity. These reflections will allow us to compare the knowledge we already have. But above all, to share and to help, to increase the knowledge that have all the participants. I hope that you find this course interesting and useful, and I really hope that you now enjoy it as much as we have developing it.
