Destinies of minority languages

Have a look at the whole worlds’ languages to know distinction of their status and power and how a language dies or goes extinct. While some few languages are on the rise of their dominance, status and power in relationships with others, many other languages, 90% of worlds’ languages – about 6200, go extinct. As definition of some linguists, it means that the ethnic group who used to speak these languages now no longer uses their mother tongues, as their principal languages. Many kinds of pressures come together to put on smaller languages, such as economic pressures, affect of globalization, government policies that may favor certain official languages and actively or at least implicitly oppress smaller languages. Moreover, when the number of speakers may drop under a few hundreds or thousands, and living separately, the pressure to shift from their native mother tongue to a more dominant language is greater enormous. Even younger generation in the community perceives the social and economic advantages of speaking the more dominant language and voluntarily starts to become bilingual. By that moment, the next generation has a weaker grasp of its mother tongue. Generally, about third generation, minority language speakers can no longer speak to or understand their grandparents and great-grandparents. So the shift from one language to a larger, dominant language can happen quite rapidly.

In the age of globalization nobody can deny that the knowledge of the English language is one of so indispensable tools to succeed individually, regionally, and globally. It is one of the international languages, a tool of communication in hi-tech devices among countries, cultural groups, various companies and organizations, communities and friends. Over the centuries, only few languages of dominant societies have served as auxiliary languages, sometimes gaining the international level, and have been used in recent times in many parts of the world. About only 25 languages are spoken by 50 percent of the world’s population of about 3.4 billion as mother or first language. Therefore half the world population speaks one of the remaining 5,975 languages. The languages on top are Mandarin, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, French, and so on. It also means that most of the rest of the words’ languages have been used only in community, at homes. The speakers of these less dominant languages need to acquire national language and international language if they want to be successful in their lives.

For this main reason and some other reasons, languages nowadays are dying at an extremely rapid rate. About half of world’s languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers. Some think about 90% of world’s languages are listed as “endangered” or “threatened” could be death within 21st century. The destructive power seems stronger than a tsunami. Urgently is required language planning measure to maintain linguistic diversity, as it is ecology of languages.

Language maintenance is the protection and promotion of the first or native language in an individual or within a speech community, particularly among language minorities. Yet languages have no existence without people, the process of language maintenance involves different levels, individuals, community, nation, and linguists (through bilingual education, and language planning). Minority languages can be the languages of indigenous groups or of immigrants, which constantly cope with pressures of assimilation and replacement of the dominant language.

The only reason for mankind to keep language diversity is because language is the present of the unique culture, the civilization and the knowledge of a community, a nation. There is some domains of minority language use related to traditional values, cultures, and religions which unable to replace by any other languages.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1567