In the 20th century, about 400 languages have gone extinct, which is about one every three months. Nowadays, about 100 languages in the world have only a few speakers, which means they are going to disappear. These languages are facing problem that the speaker themselves are unlikely to advertise what they speak. Most of the speakers do not meet and speak their native language. However, even the native speakers’ skill can degrade if they do not speak so often. This makes it harder to save those languages. Living in a big society, the parents do not like to teach their sons how to speak their native language, and the children are hardly able to get access to their native language, which is very common in America. The parents will send their children to boarding school, where their can only speak English. Even today, the English speakers may have discrimination to non-English speakers after hundreds of years of anti-unfairness campaigns.
In Austria, there were about 300 languages spoken in this continent when the European first arrived. After that, 100 have already gone extinct. Most of the left languages are also in danger. In fact, only a dozen of the native languages are being taught to children.
Some argue that if it is really important for us to save those disappearing language. Those tongues may extinct only because they do not fit the world any more, just like the species will die out if it is not strong enough to survive. Couldn’t we just regard it as a normal process of how this world evolves in Darwinism method?
However, language is important to learn a culture. For example, in Cherokee, there is no word for goodbye, only “I will see you again”. Researching on the language is one of the most important ways to study the culture, how the very group of people expresses their emotion, how they live and how their value is like. Without language, the culture itself will disappear. As a result, if we want to be a person with unique culture, we must save those languages. Besides, languages can contain different kinds of frameworks of thinking.
For many reasons, linguists are trying to save the endanger language by making dictionary, recording history, translating stories and some other methods. We a making some achievements, for example, Cherokee, a language of a minority, are presently offered in local school. More children now can speak their native language, which is a large progress compared to the condition in the 1990’s.
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