SCHOOL PROJECT - VANISHING VOICES AND EXTINCTION OF LANGUAGES

 Vanishing Voices & The Extinction OF

Languages

Linguistic mixture gives us exceptional perspectives into the human mind because it discloses the many creative ways in which humans consolidate and classify their experience. Anyone who has learned another language can appreciate the exclusivity of expression that is lost in any conversion. The vocabulary of a language is a portfolio of the items a culture talks about and has characterized in order to make sense of the world and to survive in a local ecosystem.

The rapid loss of linguistic diversity has really only arisen in the last thousand years or so. For much of human history, the number of languages was roughly constant. That is because there were no immense, permanent differences between the expansionary prospective of different peoples of the kind that might cause the continuous expansion of a single, dominant language. 

This equilibrium has been punctured forever, first by the invention and spread of Agriculture, then by the rise of colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, and today by globalization, Electronic technology, and so onwards. These forces have boosted some few languages to spread over the earth during the last few centuries.

No one knows for sure how many languages there are on earth today, but we estimate that there are around 6,700. However, huge inequalities exist among them in terms of numbers of speakers. Speakers of the ten most commonly spoken languages—Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German, and Wu Chinese—make up half the world's population, and this figure is increasing. The hundred most commonly spoken languages account for 90% of all people, with the remaining 6,600 confined to 10% of the world's most disregarded peoples, who have generally been on the retreat for several hundred years. The majority of these less commonly spoken languages are may be at risk.

Why is this problem ignored or Misunderstood ? There are many reasons why language extinction has been overlooked. One reflects a common, but faulty, belief that the presence of many languages poses a barrier to communication, to economic development, and modernization more generally. Furthermore, according to me when a language dies, a way of understanding the world die along it, a way of looking at the world! Which is a Big problem to worry...

Thank You !

Shashwat Jain