Voices Of The World The Extinction Of Language Summary

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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.” Then the video moves on to Australia and that this country has lost “95% of their linguistic heritage.” The video brings in Peter K. Austin a professor who has studied the aboriginal language for over 30 years. He says that 12 of the languages that he studies are no longer being spoken by native people. All of this language loss is due to the colonization of Australia. When people from distant lands started coming to Australia they brought sickness that the natives had no immune system against. Not only did sickness kill many people, but the foreigners that came to Australia killed locals. Western Aranda says “when the whites arrived there were 250 languages” along with 450 different dialects there was a total of 700 languages and now there is only 70 languages left. Luckily now there are radios that play the aboriginal’s …show more content…

There the video talks about how language was basically beaten from the poor. The prison has no dialect and things in the prison seem to be very hush hush. The video then moves to Mexico where Totonac is dying out because of the Spanish language. The Totonac culture is disappearing because it is basically frowned upon by many people. So all these kids that grew up speaking the Totonac language are learning Spanish and the Totonac culture is dying out. Kids that do speak and dress of Totonac are made fun of and therefore the culture will continue to die because of the way people view the

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