Let Each Culture Decide Which Languages To Save, and How
Sarah Bunin Benor, Ph.D., Director, Jewish Language Project; Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics
When a language is endangered, what does it mean to save it? For many activists, the answer is fluency: new generations of speakers, raised in immersion schools and taught by elders. Sarah Bunin Benor, Ph.D., who founded and runs the Hebrew Union College Jewish Language Project, argues that this is too narrow a definition. Most communities lack the members, money, or time to make it happen, and that doesn’t make the urgency of the loss any less real. Thousands of languages are disappearing because of genocide, repression, and forced assimilation.
In this piece, Benor distinguishes between revitalization, which aims to restore everyday use, and reclamation, which lets each community set its own goals. She draws on two Jewish languages to show how different those goals can look. Ladino is attracting new learners through classes, apprenticeships, and even a chatbot, while Judeo-Kashani survives through a handful of people building a dictionary so future generations will have something to return to. Both responses are valid, she argues, and the decision belongs to the communities themselves, not to outside activists.