[ibrahima]

I feel much the same way (though, considering I learned English at the age of 4 and never really learned much more of my parents' language after that, calling English my second language is grossly misleading). I feel a vague attachment just because my grandfather was a professor of Bengali literature and I'd like to be able to read his work, but I don't sweat over the fact that my grasp of the language is very basic. I don't need to use it too often, and people back in the "motherland" can worry about preserving the language or not.

The analogy to open source projects is spot on; while you might have some "emotional" attachment to a library/technology that you learned early on, you probably wouldn't make significant decisions based on that. I learned to program in VB5, yet I dropped it as soon as I learned Java because it was just an awful language (though I guess human languages don't really have notions of superiority or inferiority like some programming languages might).

[llllllllllll]

The analogy to open source projects is spot on

Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time.

When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.

[oblio]

I doubt that a language dieing in 2014 would be completely gone from all record.

Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.

[llllllllllll]

There are plenty of extant languages that don't have an alphabet either. They will be "lost" in every sense of the word.

The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point.

The analogy to code is way off.

[sampo]

Just a guess: (1) It's maybe difficult to separate one missing their country, and missing the language of their country. (2) Also it's maybe easier to miss the homeland, when the homeland is a rich western country, and moving back home would not mean any decrease in standard of living or safety (might even be an improvement over US or UK).