Language Death

A language is a system of communication which consists of symbols and words utilised for writing and talking.
Language is a way in which we are able to express our ideas, opinions and thoughts with others. Language
death is a phenomenon in which a language gets extinct when the last speaker of that language dies.
The thing about language is that in controls communication and how people communicate among their society,
so if these strong languages subdue the smaller ones that are considered less important the languages that rule
the other will not only have the control of communication but also on how people interact and by the end in
the own culture of the society; because linguistic imperialism includes the insertion of culture and costumes
of the country were the language comes. According to the Ethnologue that’s a kind of encyclopaedia that talks
about the living languages nowadays, says "it turns out that 389 (or nearly 6%) of the world’s languages have
at least one million speakers and account for 94% of the world’s population. By contrast, the remaining 94%
of languages are spoken by only 6% of the world’s people." (Lewis, 2009), and the three most spoken
languages are Chinese with 1213 million speakers, Spanish with 329 million and English with 328 million
speakers. (Lewis, 2009). According to the UNESCO 50% of the world’s languages are endangered of
extinction, from my perspective this is the result of the work of the governments of different countries that try
to make an internationalization of their language and that has been shown through the multiple adaptations
that have been created to refer to some terms in other languages.
n order to give an example of what I have been referring to, I’m going to mention some facts of the
internationalization of English. The reason why I decided to use English as an example it’s because I believe
that it affects people around the world in different kinds of ways. Also it’s a language I have more connection
with and interaction in my daily life. English internationalization has come to various countries in different
kinds of ways. It has come through media, advertisement, movies, books, music, technology, social networks,
etc. However, people do not realize how this might affect them in their lives, but it does. A language alone
cannot accomplish what various languages like English have without any help, that’s why English learning
courses are in a higher demand day by day, according to the British Council’s website "one out of four of the
world’s population speak English to some level of competence; demand from the other three quarters is
increasing", the reason why English has such a demand is because the opportunities that people think they
would get by learning it, the issue of linguistic imperialism is not that the people are trying to learn different
languages as English because that helps us to expand our way of thinking and our point of view of different
things by getting to know other languages, it brings opportunities to people to study, work, etc. However the
real problem behind linguistic imperialism is that it affects other languages; in the case of English I have seen
how little by little my generation has introduced English terms to our vocabulary even if it’s not accurate to
use it, which I believe it modifies how people communicate, and the languages start losing their richness and
without realizing it we have just not included terms, but we have also been including customs and parts of the
culture of the English spoken cultures which not in all cases it’s something beneficial. As I have said before it
is believed that around 50% of the world’s languages will disappear by the end of this century as a consequence
of linguistic imperialism partially in my point of view. I believe this because when different languages gain
more and more power the smaller ones start to disappear due to the fact that people do not consider it has any
importance anymore, for example tribe members of different countries may that by speaking these isolated
languages that hardly anyone else knows but the small community of the tribe, they would not have a
professional qualification by talking these languages; because of this people from small communities that have
this isolated languages decide that is better to give up on the language, because they don’t see a future for their
language in a world where the powerful languages keep on ruling and isolated languages are just forgotten.
For example in Colombia there are young people that come from the indigenous tribes to the city in order to
go to the university, but they arrive to the universities believing that by speaking their isolated language and
Spanish they are already speaking two languages; however the universities asked to them to learn English as
a second language as if their mother tongue, which is the isolated language, doesn’t count.
When the isolated languages are forgotten it has a specific name, it is called language death. Language death
occurs "in unstable bilingual or multilingual speech communities as a result of language shift from a regressive
minority language to a dominant majority language." (Dressler, 1977). One example to show this is the case
of Brazil; indigenous people in Brazil are about two tenths of the country’s population and are divided in
different tribes, which in total speak around 170 languages, and all of them are in danger of extinction
(Barksdale), and all around the world in places like Africa, Europe, Japan, etc, isolated languages are
endangered as the ones in Brazil, they could disappear any day.According to the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) more or less the 50% of nowadays languages are endangered,
and will probably disappear by the end of this century. Even if I repeat that astonishing fact some people would
not realize what it really means to narrow the number of languages in the world, the extinction of a language
is not just a language that’s lost but also the cultural wealth, ancestral knowledge and more importantly the
identity of a community; that is the reason why I believe we must take care of the language diversity that we
still have in the world, because with the extinction of languages we are losing a lot with their extinction. That’s
why different policies have been created in different countries in order to protect those languages that are
considered the minority among the others. Also, programs as UNESCO’s Endangered Languages Program
were also created in order to support those minorities and preserve the linguistic diversity in the world so we
don’t lose part of our roots every time one of those languages dies.
I must accept that finding a solution for this everyday growing issue is not easy because even if through policies
there are opportunities to save some of the languages from being endangered there are others that may go
extinct; however other ways to maintain those isolated languages is to inform people from their existence,
because sometimes those languages are just forgotten in the media, for example in my country there are
commercials in which it is shown the diversity and the small communities with their own languages that are
found within my country, in my point of view is important to do this in order to inform people and show those
small communities that they are taken into account. Finally I just have to say that fighting for the preservations
of the languages is in order to preserve the cultural richness and diversity in the world.

Language Death

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A language is a system of communication which consists of symbols and words utilised for writing and talking.

that have been created to refer to some terms in other languages.

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