The Hong Kong-born singer-songwriter Emmy the Great asks why more and more musicians, from Gwenno Saunders to Maria Usbeck, are turning to their first languages for their lyrics

“A language dies every two weeks,” she explains, “and with that language dies a whole history of people. Those are things that connect you with the past. They are man and woman’s way of communicating and telling stories.”

[…]

Perhaps it’s time to retire English as pop’s lingua franca. “There’s so much out there, and it’s all so special,” says Usbeck, “Meanwhile, new generations are creating languages – think about how texting has changed the way people speak.” Rather than spread the dominance of a single language, music could be a vessel with which we explore and protect many dialects, new and old. More.

See: The Guardian

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