Is Eyak merely "aesthetic"?

A recent article by linguist and commentator John McWhorter revisits the link between language loss and culture loss, arguing that "The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic." Is the loss of Eyak merely aesthetic, a loss of some objectified beauty? Clearly to lose a language is not equivalent to losing a culture. That is a straw man argument. But surely something more than mere aesthetic value is lost when a language is lost.

McWhorter fails to notice that linguists are not the only ones who mourn the passing of small languages. Few speakers actively "choose" to shift to another, dominant language. In Alaska language shift to English is occurring within a background of more than a century of language policy which explicitly sought to exterminate Native languages. Such linguicide is not so uncommon among endangered minority languages. Indeed, it may be the norm. So it is that many speakers and their descendants do mourn the passing of Native languages. To simply say that these speakers are complicit in that loss overlooks the complex factors which are have led to the impending loss of global linguistic diversity.