Losing Languages
It's estimated that between one and four languages are lost every year, the result of the only remaining speakers dying off.
Linguists estimate that there are 6,809 "living" languages in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and some languages are even rarer – 46 are known to have just one native speaker. "There are 357 languages with under 50 speakers. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than commoner ones," Professor Sutherland said.
Linguists also estimate that half of the more than 6,000 languages currently spoken in the world will become extinct by the end of this century.
In two generations, a healthy language -- even one with hundreds of thousands of speakers -- can collapse entirely, sometimes without anyone noticing. This process is happening everywhere.
I think this is such a big shame and loss, and I totally agree with Daniel L. Everett, a Research Professor at the University of Manchester when he says:
"It might seem as though the death of one language is not a particularly serious event but, in fact, each loss is a terrible tragedy. A language is a repository of the riches of highly specialised cultural experiences. When a language is lost, all of us lose the knowledge contained in that language's words and grammar, knowledge that can never be recovered if the language has not been studied or recorded."
I think more effort should be put into preserving these languages, recording them and keeping a trace of them and the cultures, history and knowledge behind them.
Governments should try to start programs to revive languages that are in fear of distinction as a way to preserve the different indentities of their people, maybe even offering the possibility of learning these languages as a second language at school.
How many languages in your music collection? Is the U.S. winning or losing the War in Iraq? Losing What Isn't TheirsHow AWFUL that these languages are being lost!! It'd be worth nearly any price to save them!!
Posted by: Omni at November 30, 2004 03:29 AMThis is terrible. I've always been fascinated by languages, they're like doors open to whole different perspectives of human civilizations.
By time, languages are being ranked, and few are the “survivors” that made it to the top of the "official" or "most frequently used" language list.
A language can be preserved -in my opinion- by its own people in the first place. They should never stop using it, and the second step would be efforts to teach it abroad.
I think this is a very interesting topic to be discussed.
Posted by: Eman-Aqua at November 30, 2004 10:06 AMSave Gaelic!!!!
eireann go Brách
Ireland forever!:):) it's a very beautiful language:) :)
