Language Extinction


The world today has more than 6,000 languages. Linguists, however, assert that a few centuries from now, these languages could be reduced to a few hundred. Languages, too, can become extinct, like plants and animals. How do languages become extinct?
     There are actually several ways of erasing a language. The simplest, of course, is to kill off the speakers. A government could also ban the use of minority languages and  punish those who persist in using them. The British and Spanish Empires, during their heyday, are two examples of centralized states that imposed their languages to conquered peoples.
     Of course, there are less drastic, but no less effective, ways for a language to become extinct. Some languages undergo rapid change, or assimilated, and “mutates” into a different one.
Like Latin.
Latin, an extinct language, is the ancestor of modern “Romance Languages”—French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and their variants. Another language “victim” of evolution is Sanskrit, the language of ancient India. Sanskrit’s “children” are the modern Indo-Aryan languages. Intermarriage is also one of the causes of language extinction: a married couple from different ethnic backgrounds may have no common language except the majority language. Another cause is when people move to urban centers from their native speaking-villages for economic reasons and have no choice but to abandon their native tongue and adopt the majority language. Indeed, there are many ways for a language to die.  
     How does one protect a language, then? And perhaps more important, why?
Ethnologue, a catalogue of languages spoken around the world, lists about 750 extinct and near extinct languages around the world, including 110 in Asia. Languages with names like Aputai (in Indonesia), Alutor (Russian Asia), and Babuza (Taiwan). People who speak these languages are either very old, or have died without passing them on to their children. A lot of languages die that way, in fact.
     Linguists are trying to preserve languages in danger of extinction. Some have established foundations that record languages. Philanthropists have also donated funds for projects that document rare languages around the world. A foundation in California pays an indigenous language speaker to teach the language to a young relative, who is also paid. After all, the survival of a language, any language, rests on the next generation. 




     Language is a complex product of the human mind. Each has a different sound, structure, and pattern of thought. When a language is lost, the result of thousands of years of human creativity is also lost. The culture, literature, how a people sees the world—in short, the record of how a people lived—these are lost to us.
     The Philippines is especially endowed with a variety of languages: we have about 170. Compare that to Western Europe, which has a grand total of 45. Our languages make us a culturally and ethnically diverse country. Linguists are having a field day studying our languages, which are as different from one another as Chinese is from German.

Rather than divide us, the diversity of our languages should unite us.
What it all boils down is that no language can really be called superior to others. As any linguist will tell us, different languages have different advantages, and there is no such thing as an all-purpose language. We just have to learn to respect other people’s ethnicity and language.
Instead of prejudice, diversity should teach us tolerance.
Instead of rejection, acceptance.

Comments

Post a Comment

So, what do you think? Post it here:

Popular posts from this blog

The Square Cube Law and How It Killed Giants

Image
We are so used to the idea of giants that we take it for granted that they exist, or must have existed at one point in our history.  You know, those very large and very tall human-like creatures, carrying a humongous club, and being very nasty. Like this: And if you are a typical, god-fearing Catholic Pinoy, you would swear that not only are they true, you even saw one beside that big-ass, scary-looking tree not far from your home, one night when you were going home after an evening of binge-drinking with your buddies. And the bastard’s smoking a cigar as long and as big as your leg! Or you know someone who saw one of those cigar-smoking monsters. This creature is called a kapre —a cigar-smoking giant wearing a loincloth. Or maybe a tikbalang —a half-man, half-horse creature about as tall as a kapre. Unlike a centaur, however, a tikbalang is a giant with the torso and arms of a man, and the head and legs of a horse.  Scary creatures, these—and, if I may add
Read more

Vincent

Image
Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings are valued today at hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the world’s greatest painters, he is also one of the most influential figures in Post-Impressionism art. Ironic, because nobody wanted his paintings when he was alive.  He was a “weirdo” and nobody really understood him. Except for the few friends he had with other struggling, unsuccessful painters, one of whom he quarreled with, a quarrel that resulted in Van Gogh cutting off his ear with  a razor.  He also suffered from delusions and had psychotic breaks. He seldom ate and drank heavily. He was one of those tortured souls who had so much to give but was largely ignored. His genius and artistry nobody really got while he was alive. He was an idealist, a sensitive soul who had too much empathy. Imagine somebody like that living today.  At age 37, Vincent Van Gogh - struggling with depression, mental illness, and thinking that he was a failure - killed himself.  You know, maybe Don McLean
Read more

Typhoons and Earthquakes in the Philippines

Image
The Philippines has more than its fair share of disasters, and not because the country is particularly cursed or anything, but because the entire archipelago—purportedly composed of 7,100 islands—lies on a region in the Pacific Ocean called the “Ring of Fire” (actually, the area is shaped more like a horseshoe, although to be fair, “The Horseshoe of Fire” doesn’t have the same impact as the “Ring of Fire”). About 40,000 kilometers long, the “ring” runs from the southern tip of South America, up along the coast of North America, across the Bering Strait, down through Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia (the Ring of Fire’s western edge extends into the Indian Ocean), and to New Zealand.  The “Fire” part of the Ring of Fire is because a string of 452 volcanoes dot this line, like a malevolent game of connect-the-dots. The regions along this line experience volcanic eruptions and periodic earthquakes—majority of them small, hardly-felt tremors, and the few devastating ones that kil
Read more

The Queen of Heaven

Image
Inanna, “The Queen of Heaven,” is a goddess of Sumerian origin: goddess of warfare, fertility, and sexual love. The Akkadians called her Ishtar , a name from which Easter was derived. Yes, the Christian holiday. Inanna is the most popular and important female deity in ancient Mesopotamia. She is also known as a healer, life giver, composer of songs, and possessing a wide range of emotions—passionate, ambitious, jealous, grieving, joyful, timid, and generous. In later cultures, she went by different names: Astarte, Isis, Aphrodite—she was the Goddess. She is the original femme fatale , the embodiment of the woman every man dreams about; the female that devours men, the female that attracts/scares men; the virgin harlot. Every man knows at least one. The goddess makes an appearance in Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods.”  Throughout Sumer’s existence, her powers and deeds were glorified and extolled in myth, epic, and hymn. No one dared oppose her, neither god nor man. She was
Read more