But would the death of English accelerate the death of civilization? Look at the history of English. As far as the civilized languages go, it has one of the shortest histories of domestication. A mere 1,500 years ago, the civilized world recoiled from the barbarism of the Anglo-Saxons. Even the other barbarians (Germanic tribes) saw the Anglo-Saxons as particularly uncivilized. Granted, English has since embraced civilization with all the fervor you’d expect of a new convert, but compare it to some of the languages that have a deep history of domestication. For example, it has none of the formal tense that enforces hierarchy down to your very speech, as you have in the Romance languages descended from Latin.
I’ll readily grant that the tendrils of domesticated logic wind their way through the English language deeply. But they similarly wind their way through our own brains deeply. People who study native languages rarely have sudden epiphanies about the relationship of humans to the world, because even though the languages they study open up new horizons for those possibilities, the people studying them bring their domestication to them. Now I heartily agree that we should study native languages. But whether we use that to replace English, or to understand the language of our land and inform a project of rewilding English, I see as a somewhat more complicated problem. Of all the civilized languages, English seems to me to have the most potential, if only because domestication has shaped it only so recently. As I mentioned before, if we can’t rewild English, I worry what that means about our own potential.