Languages Soon To Be Lost Forever?

By Rahul Kumar

As time has gone and the world has progressed, we have been losing things at an alarming pace. One of the things most paid attention to when lost are species of plants and animals. When gone, we will never see them again. Just recently have we been noticing another thing we will soon lose if proper steps are not taken. This "thing" is the world’s many languages. There are many major languages such as English, Chinese, Sanskrit, etc.

There are about 6,800 languages of the world and it is expected that more than half will be gone by the end of this century. One major reason is that half of the languages are spoken by less than 2,500 people. Over half are languages people have never even heard of such as Udihe, Eyak or Arikapu. UNESCO, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization states that a language needs at least 100,000 speakers to survive for another generation.

There are many factors contributing to the demise of our languages. The factors are things like genocide, fatal natural disasters and most commonly, the adoption of more dominant and known languages such as Chinese and Russian. The government can also put bans on languages, slowly killing them. The future for languages such as Udihe, Eyak and Arikapu does not look good. These are spoken in Siberia, Alaska and the jungles of the Amazon respectively. One hundred speak Udihe, six speak Arikapu and only one speaks Eyak. Marie Smith from Alaska is thought to be the last known speaker of Eyak.

It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find speakers of languages such as Navajo, Maori or Cornish now. The loss of these languages does not only affect communities but also people studying the fields of past cultures, language, etc. Linguists, anthropologists and others lose the rich scource of material for their work on documenting a people’s history, finding out what they knew and tracking where they moved from each region. Our world in terms of lingual matters will also become less diverse.

Only eight countries account for more than half of all existing languages today. These countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Mexico, Cameroon, Australia and Brazil. Thousands of languages are believed to be extinct already. It is continuing at an alarming rate. Linguists believe 3,400 to 6,120 languages could be gone by the year 2100. This means the death of a language occurs every two weeks!

Some languages are actually "coming back from the dead". Hawaiians created the ‘Aha Punana Leo organization in 1983 to reintroduce their native language throughout the state, including its public schools. The language was almost wiped out when the U.S banned schools from teaching the language after they had annexed the then-independent country in 1898. Now, there are 7000 to 10000 Hawaiians that now speak their native tongue. That is up from 1983 when there were less than 1000 speaking the language.

There are also efforts in other areas to revive other languages such as Cornish and the ancient Mayan languages of Mexico.

Governments can help by removing bans on languages and children should be encouraged to speak other languages other than their native one.

In my personal opinion, I do think it is horrible to lose even a language spoken by only one person. When a language is lost, we completely lose the history of a part of our people. But having so many lanauges is bad. If there was only one or several languages, everyone could understand each other so there would be a lot less confusion. I think we should take all the information from smaller, less known languages and convert them to either one universal language or several huge widely-spoken languages like English. This way, a lot more people can understand the wide, diverse culture of the human race without learning that particular language and such. But this is probably impossible to do. It would be incredibly time consuming and costly to do.