As the English language gets more and more prevalent around the world, more and more discussions will come up about what a global language would look like. David Harrison author of “When Languages Die” writes about what will be lost when other languages die out and another rises. Harrison focuses more on the negatives of what a global language would look like rather than the positives. The author of “Why a global language” writes about the good and the bad that would come from a global language. David Harrison writes in his book, “When Languages Die” that humans lose a lot of knowledge and culture when a language dies out. He believes that languages hold important value and if a powerful language like english takes over than history and heritage is lost too. Harrison writes that, “A language dies every 10 days” (5). This is an important statistic …show more content…
Harrison believes this a scary trend because most of what the human kind knows about nature and the natural world comes from memory and of unwritten languages. Those memories and knowledge have a significant value that could very well be forgotten. He also shows that much of what we know about medicine and plants come from dying languages that need to be revived. Culture is also lost when a global language takes over. Poetry, art, and jokes are lost when every language dies. When it dies it takes a long some of what makes humans unique and diverse. Language also gives linguistics more information about the human mind and cognitive function. Odd languages show how humans do not all think the same, but that there are many diverse ways to solving problems.
Even though the dominance of a language can allow for the loss of a culture, it can also bring awareness. In schools, local community centers and other various places, foreign languages are taught, not only do non-native speakers take on these languages but native speakers do as well to keep their culture. By doing so it “revitalizes cultures and cultural artifacts through foreign influences, technologies, and markets.” (Gerdes
For this summary I watched a video called Voices of the World: The Extinction of Language and Linguistic Diversity. The video starts off with how people believe that there are about 6, 000 languages. David Crystal talks about how with all these different languages half of them are endangered of becoming extinct. Each different language offers a different point of view of the world and culture. He said that if different languages are lost then “we lose the meaning what is it to be human.”
What is language death? Campbell (1994:1961) as cited in Janse, M and Tol, S (2003) describes language death as the loss of a language due to gradual shift in the dominant language. Language death sounds stark and to say language death is like saying a person is dying (Crystal, D:2000, 1). It is a protracted change of a state (Mufwene, SS: 2004, 204). What are endangered languages? They are languages that are in the process of dying (Janse, M; Tol, S:2003). They are languages that exist under the shadow of a dominant language and are on the verge of becoming extinct (Lewis, M et al: 2014). Endangered languages are a serious concern in which linguists have turned their attention too (Lewis, M et al: 2014). The death and endangerment of languages across the world is a major concern among linguists and anthropologists (Crystal, D:2000).
Web. 23 Apr. 2012. . 7) Wilford, John Noble. "World's Language Dying Off Rapidly." Www.nytimes.com.
It has become the main way of communication and interaction for the whole world. This has put other cultural languages in danger, but the fate of these groups measures the distributed language and they have been protected and preserved. Endangered Languages Because of the inability to teach young children the language of their culture, the languages have begun to be endangered pulling through only by the effort of the community itself. The South Pacific and North America dominated by English and Latin America dominated by Spanish and Portuguese, are the regions with the most dying language.
Language influences the view of the world, embodies a person’s essential for survival to communicate with people, interpret ideas, and have perspective about cultural and traditional knowledge. However, Language extinction is a huge element in every day’s life. Because language extinction also means the culture, religion, social values, and its history is slowly getting loss at the same time. There are many factors to language extinction due to the population, educational, and economic principles. Melanesian is one of the rapid extinction of the world's languages that are endangered before they disappear completely.
Losing variation of tongues, vocabulary and grammatical systems decreases multilingualism because people are less forced to speak another vernacular. In other words, we lose unique sounds and words developed by humans after years of evolution, when languages extinguish. If they keep disappearing, humans will be forced to speak the same vernacular and the advantages of learning another dialect will get lost. Some experiments have proved that learning another language increases speakers’ communication skills. The internal parietal cortex area of the brain becomes denser when the speaker increases its capability to process information in various languages. Another point is that by learning another vernacular, it's expected for the speaker to gain a different interpretation of life. According to the New York Time Article Why Save a Language? “Yeli Dnye… has 11 different ways to say “on” depending on whether something is horizontal, vertical, on a point, scattered, attached and more…” (McWhortery, 2014, 2). Yeli speakers can relate the same word in 11 different ways because they have a broader vocabulary. Every language gives a unique pathway of thought to its speaker and has exceptional attributes. If a language vanishes before the world sees it or records it, then a small piece of humanity’s heritage
It is a common fact that we are not only taught language itself but we are also taught culture of that nation. Language is the one which reflect all the characteristics of a nation’s culture. It also stores all the social lives and experience of a nation. When a child starts learning a language of a different nation, at the same time he is learning the culture of that nation too. Learning a culture of the language is very important because if a person is not familiar with the culture of a nation, he/she cannot learn the language of the nation well. “I did not believe that the world is made of quarks or electro-magnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or of any such things, the world is made of language” (Harms 21). This shows the importance of language in today’s society. Language is a part of one’s culture and every country gives preference to its own language. As one of the founding fathers of the Afrikaans language, Rev SJ du Toit, wrote in 1891, which ...
...nology is moving ahead at the speed of light. With all this advancement comes the inevitable need for a language that unifies the world. The need for a common language to conduct our business and economic affairs, and our need to communicate internationally on political and world interventions has made English the leader in world languages. It is not the language spoken first by most, but it the language that the world uses when it comes together to communicate.
Finally, there are many different varieties of English, or as it is called Englishes, such as Singaporean English, Indian English and Nigerian English. Each variety of English expresses the identity and culture of its speakers. It has been predicted that in the distant future these forms of English will fragment into mutually unintelligible varieties. Therefore, this fragmentation may slow the spread of English as a global language.
It has been adopted by different sectors making it one of the most used languages in the globe. This has been attributed to its effective nature, easy learning and rich history. However, conservative groups exist who argues that there should be global language since it may cause the emergence of superior cultures. Nevertheless, it is evident that different cultures ranging from the early polish immigrants, the African American community, the advertising and media will greatly benefit from the globalization of the English language. This will prove in the end that English is indeed a global
In order to visualize the “global” as an adjective in the collocation “global language”, a study has shown the numbers of people speaking the language. According to them, there are about 6000 languages in the world and not surprisingly English is at the top of the list of most dominant. In the world there are 375 million first-language speakers, approximately the same number of second-language speakers and about 750 million foreign-language speakers (David Graddol, The Future of English? A Guide to Forecasting the Popularity of the English Language in the 21st Century. British Council, 1997). According to magazine Economist, more than one billion people speak some form of English. These numbers could make people think that English is really conquering the world which can be both positive and negative.
Some indigenous languages have died with the elimination of their speakers through genocide or any other calamity. Secondly, many lost their existence because they were not documented and described. Weinreich (1953:68) defines language shift as a "change from the habitual use of one language to that of another". It means the number of speakers comes down in a downward movement, the speakers lose their proficiency and the language use decreases in every sphere of life (Baker and Jones, 1998). In this way, the minority languages shift their sympathies to the majority languages. The process of shift is sometimes so intense that the speakers of the weaker languages relinquish their local language completely (Rasul, 2006). According to Baker (2011) in the forthcoming century around 50 to 90 percent languages of the world will either die or will be on the threshold of
This essay will discuss how the English language contributes to globalization. It also shows some problems that arise from this. Furthermore, we will give or suggest some solutions for these problems.
It can be seen that English has become a global language, which is determined by lots of factors like history, culture and daily usefulness. Because of these factors, the number of people who speak English is still increasing now. English, as a significant part of social life gradually exerted profound impacts on education, job hunting and international communication. Also, it provides the whole world with a chance to share ideas and communicate freely. We are quite curious to see the further development of English as a lingua franca in the