In this article, staff writer at Science, Emily Underwood describes the reason why language is declining in the world faster than the most endangered species. There is a study that proves that economic development is the cause to the decline. Oddly enough, the very thing that has promoted globalization is slowly killing off languages such as Eyak in Alaska and Ubykh in Turkey. Weaker languages like Eyak and Ubykh are being dominated by mega-power languages such as English and Mandarin Chinese. English and Mandarin Chinese are the most commonly used languages in the economic world. With this known, many parts of the world are taking the hint and abandoning their language for those dominant languages.
Tatsuya Amano is the head of this study and used sources like Ethnologue (online repository) to determine out of the 6909 languages in the world, 649 of those languages will die off. Surely, Amano blames economic development but has scarce evidence to prove how economic development is the cause to language loss. This scarce evidence prompts Leane Hilton, a linguist at the University of California to say that economic development is not the only cause to language loss but factors like dominant cultures, disease, murder and genocide. Fortunately, there are revitalization efforts to help save endangered languages.
I found this article interesting. I researched about economic growth affecting languages a few days ago because in my Anthropology class we talked about how languages are growing but also are declining. The class agreed that economic development was because of it but I could not wrap my head around the language loss in a globalizing economy. I had always believed that learning another language was because it was needed in order to succeed but with scary studies like Amano's study I found that maybe language is declining because of how these dominant languages are taking over in the economic world.
Article: Languages are being wiped out by economic growth
Interesting. I mean, it makes sense to me that languages would be dying due to globalization. The world is an economic market and full consumers. English and Mandarin are the most dominant languages in the economic market, so in order to do business countries will teach those languages. Now in order to survive and become prominent in the international market a business will want to learn one of these two. There is actually a job market to teach English (Business) in other countries. So putting it all together, along with other evidence, it makes sense to me. I've ranted quite a bit..I have no idea why. This is how I view it and make sense of this. Later.
ReplyDeleteEndangered languages are definitely a problem. My issue is that in the US we have little respect for learning multiple languages, so if we ourselves aren't willing to maintain multiple languages how can we expect those with less resources to maintain their own? Very interesting data, I always enjoy hearing a little bit more about languages. I would venture that globalization has also prevented the complete loss of some languages by providing outside resources that wouldn't have been available 20 or 30 years ago. I'm beginning to pick up on a pattern in you posts. :)
ReplyDeleteThe article is eye opening. It is crazy to think that there is culture dying.
ReplyDelete