Human Language

2 Pages 453 Words

The majority of languages in human history have passed from the scene they have fallen victim to predators, changing environments, or more successful competitors. Today, the death of the language is proceeding generically and globally, but especially in the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia. Modern cultures, abetted by new technologies, are encroaching ononce-isolated peoples with drastic effects on their way of life and on the environments they inhabit. Destruction of lands and livelihoods; the spread of consumerism, individualism, and other Western values; pressures for assimilation into dominant cultures; and conscious policies of repression directed at indigenous groups - these are among the factors threatening the world's biodiversity as well as its cultural and linguistic diversity. There are many reasons why languages die. There is no right estimate that how many people can speak a particular language fluently, since the Census has no way of knowing whether these are fluent speakers. It simply asks the rather vague and ambiguous question: "Does this person speak a language other than English at home?" But not "How well?" "How often?" or "Under what circumstances?" It causes language to fail, because we can not help that which language is dying. More often language death is the culmination of language shift, resulting from a complex of internal and external pressures that induce a speech community to adopt a language spoken by others. These may include changes in values, rituals, or economic and political life resulting from trade, migration, intermarriage, religious conversion, or military conquest. The prospects to survive a language are determined not by any intrinsic traits, or capacity for adaptation, but by social forces alone. Sometimes community decides for reasons of functional economy, to suppress a part of itself. Many multilingual parents no longer consider it necessary or worthwhile for the future of the...