- For Teachers
"English is very important." "English is the key to the world."
These are what teachers told us, and we all realized that in our country.
But, what about those missing languages? What happened to them?
What will happen after those lanugaes missing? Nothing will happen?
Why those languages is vanishing?
What is the definition of "important" in the language field?
Do you think the problem here is only about the language?
Please reply me as soon as you can, thank you very much!!!
Languages are dying out at a very fast rate nowadays. I am afraid that most small languages are unlikely to survive.
They are dying- most indigenous languages are either dead or at serious risk of death. This link is a list of the dead and dying languages of North East Asia: Endangered languages in Northeast Asia: indexes
You will see that the list is large. Regional languages are at far more risk than national languages, and it is at the regional level that this mass extinction can be seen.
You can get the full UNESCO Red Book of endangered languages here: Red Book on Endangered Languages.
How about the Aramaic, is it still in use in some countries?
I think this is a BIG issue, with one language a day disappearing. It isn't just a case of quantity though, rather quality. A language is a way of seeing / forming reality. We lose another world, another planet blown out of the sky. It doesn't bode well for the future for language is but freedom.....
I made a long blog post here. Watch the great speach by Wade Davis, sterling. My undergrad was in anthropology and I am still a student of the world....
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