Andrew Woodfield, director of the Centre for Theories of Language and Learning
in Bristol, England, suggested in a 1995 seminar on language conservation that people
do not yet know all the ways in which linguistic diversity is important. "The fact is, no
25 one knows exactly what riches are hidden inside the less-studied languages," he says.
Woodfield compares one argument for conserving unstudied endangered plants
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that they may be medically valuable with the argument for conserving endangered
languages. We have inductive evidence based on past studies of well-known languages
that there will be riches, even though we do not know what they will be. It seems
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