According to the National Geographic a language dies every 14 days. Researchers show that the list of endangered languages is getting longer every day and that, by the next century, nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear. Some even argue that up to 90 percent of today’s languages will have vanished by 2115. Many of these have never actually been recorded and therefore would be lost forever.
Languages die for various reasons, which can be political, economic, or cultural. For example, the majority of second-generation immigrants to the United States do not speak their parents’ languages fluently: it is economically and culturally more beneficial to speak English.
Some people argue that language loss, like species loss, is simply a fact of life on an ever-evolving planet.
When a language dies, however, it is not only about words. Languages shape the way people think; they influence their personalities and the way they perceive the world around them.
In the Tuvan language, for example, khoj özeeri defines the slaughter of a sheep. It does not, however, only mean slaughter. For the Tuvan the word implies kindness, humaneness, a ceremony by which a family can kill, skin, and butcher a sheep, salting its hide and preparing its meat, making sausage with the blood and cleansed entrails so neatly that the whole process can be accomplished in just two hours. Khoj özeeri implies a relationship to animals that is also a measure of a people’s character.
Another example is found in the Aka language, in which there is no word for job in the sense of salaried labour. This is probably a result of the tribe’s isolation and their radical self-sufficiency.
Again, Cherokee, has no word for goodbye, only “I will see you again”. Likewise, no phrase exists for “I’m sorry”. On the other hand, it has special expressions all its own. One word – oo-kah-huh-sdee –represents the mouth-watering, cheek-pinching delight experienced when seeing an adorable baby or a kitten.
Nowadays, there are many projects with the aim of documenting endangered languages and preventing language extinction. Saving them will not only safeguard a culture and its words, it will allow the world to preserve ancient knowledge, promote the diversity of thoughts and ideas, maintain the possibility of new studies in all possible fields of science and social behaviour.
In the face of this linguistic change, lexicographer Susie Dent uses her Twitter platform to share fun “word of the day” posts. For example, on the day that Donald Trump was arrested, Dent shared “‘mugshot’: the use of ‘mug’ for a face looks back to 18th-century drinking mugs that often represented a grotesque human face … ”.
By using social media to reach a wide audience, Dent’s linguistic content has the power to spark interesting conversation about words. If you are interested in more fun linguistic content check out our Instagram.
Read more:
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/
http://culturesofresistance.org/language-preservation
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/vanishing-languages/rymer-text
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages