Language loss

It is a real tragedy that so many of the world’s ‘small’ languages are already dead, or dying.

No, as a professional linguist I’m not saying that better communication is a bad thing,! But language is deeply tied to our own personal and group identities. When a language dies out, part of the identity of those people - their culture, their oral/written traditions - also dies.

The reasons are in fact probably at least as much political as practical - because there is no reason why we all can’t speak several langages, as indeed is the case in many, many countries. (Most the people I know in Nepal speak at least 3 very different languages, and fluently.) But national leaders want to keep control of their subjects, and enforcing one national language as the medium of instruction in schools and in public administration is one way of trying to guard against separatism.

I’m not inventing this, and it’s not yet another conspiracy teory. There is ample documentation, from all over - for example, Spain, Nepal, Tibet and not least the Amazon rainforests of Brazil, where I’ve recently edited a book for the Norwegian Rainforest Foundation, describing their indigenous education projects and the long history of problems with the national government..

For more information on dying languages in general, one relevant reference is http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090219/ts_afp/worldlanguagesunesco

concerning Unesco’s work research in this field.

I am not talking about the world ending by any means. I am talking about all the different languages we have in the world reducing. There are many languages that are not spoken anymore today. Why do you think that is. Personally I think its so we can all communicate better, we are forming a shared langauge among each other and the other languages are not being used as much and therefor are gradually being forgotten

Sorry,I thought that’s where you were going,like Monique said,people that for example move into the United States learn English pretty fast sometimes and end up stop using the language they were born with,and like you said it can be lost if they stop using it.

Maybe because people rarely speak or practice the language, so in time it will be lost all together.

If your talking about the world ending,it’s highly doubtful that that will happen.