"Learn English! It's the language of the future!" How that statement does annoy the Liberals.
There is nothing more dead than a dying language
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
SCIENCE LAB: "Not Just Words: Preserving languages gains new importance after UNESCO lists more than 2,400 at risk," by Kari Lydersen, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 23-29 March 2009. Link
America is a major source of dying languages, virtually all being Native American tongues disappearing. We have lost, by the UN's count, 115 languages over the past 500 years (assuming we don't take the blame on those first 250 years). Why are languages lost? Languages have been dying for 10,000 years, going back to the dawn of the agricultural era. When everybody's roaming, languages are highly specific to tribe, but once people start settling down and trading a bit, common tongues prevail and the isolated ones are extinguished by time. Anything that encourages connectivity and aggregation of people kills languages, so guess what? Globalization will be the ultimate language killer. Half of the world's remaining 2100 languages will be gone by 2100. Why the world would still want to be conversing in a thousand languages in 2100 is completely beyond me in terms of communication utility, even as I understand the innate desire for identity retention. But the real killer here is simply the desire of humans to connect. The more they connect, they more they abandon languages that divide or isolate. |
