Lost in Assimilation

As a writer, language is the only tool I have to get my work across. So, of course, I am going to defend it's disappearance, even if it's not my native tongue that's vanishing, but that's how I like to picture it. I think a good way to try to understand what's happening to languages all across the reaches of the earth is to imagine that the English language is dying. I know personally, I would feel somewhat threatened. Look at everything the English language stands for, every image it conjures up in history, in today's world. Why do people speak it today? What kind of weight does a language like English carry? Remember, we think to ourselves in English, well, most of us.
While I'm being pretentious and asking rhetorical questions, I'll say that each language in the world paints a portrait of the speakers culture. The way they structure sentences,the complexity, the simplicity, the words they choose to hold a lot of meaning, words with multiple meanings, borrowed words, things that were not assigned words at all. Some languages include single words that refer to specific and complex situations that take other languages sentences to tell. It speaks volumes of a people, really.
Language, to me, is the cornerstone of all human civilization. It goes hand in hand with just about everything. What if the Egyptians couldn't have communicated verbally or otherwise, with one another. We would probably have some pretty shitty pyramids. Language allows us to live in groups, and conduct politics. It's such an inherent mannerism, to talk, that taking a language away from a culture would be like removing the composer from the symphony orchestra.
Sure, trying to revive every language that is dying is futile, and no doubt streamlining our list of world languages is a product of globization, among other things, but losing a language altogether means losing a history. Every sound and symbol of a language may be arbitrary outside itself, but collectively, languages and their evolution through time help us understand who we were, and who we've become.
One more language dead is one more language Columbia College students can get tattooed on themselves, and nobody wants that.