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On Dixon’s ‘dangerous idea’

  • Víctor M. Longa EMAIL logo and Juan J. López-Rivera
Published/Copyright: May 18, 2022

Abstract

In his book Are some languages better than others?, the leading linguist R.M.W. Dixon put forward what we refer to as ‘Dixon’s dangerous idea’, i.e. the idea that linguistics should evaluate the relative worth of languages and provide some general criteria for deciding whether certain languages can be taken to be better or worse than others. Although it is obviously licit to raise this question, Dixon’s arguments when answering it are inaccurate, thus spreading a dangerous idea. This article critically discusses Dixon’s proposals and shows how his arguments draw on arbitrary and decontextualized criteria, and on naive evolutionary ideas of absolute fitness.


Corresponding author: Víctor M. Longa, Departamento de Lingua e Literatura Españolas, Teoría da Literatura e Lingüística Xeral, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, E-mail:

Review article of R.M.W. Dixon (2016), Are some languages better than others? Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Funding source: Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness

Award Identifier / Grant number: FFI2017-87699-P

Funding source: Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities

Award Identifier / Grant number: PGC2018-096550-B-100

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to three anonymous Folia Linguistica reviewers and Guillermo Lorenzo for their insightful suggestions, and Olga Fischer and Sune Gregersen for their discerning comments and editorial support.

  1. Research funding: Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under Grant FFI2017-87699-P (Víctor M. Longa); and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under Grant PGC2018-096550-B-100 (Juan J. López-Rivera).

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Received: 2021-09-06
Accepted: 2022-01-17
Published Online: 2022-05-18
Published in Print: 2022-08-26

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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