Blog 7

Vanishing Voices

One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?

By Russ Rymer

 

 I love NatGeo articles so when I came across this one on our topic for the blog this week, I thought it would be perfect! I talks about several languages at varying degrees of endangerment, and the people who speak them. The most touching story for me in the article was about the boy whose father was a priest and his father before him. The boy cannot continue the tradition of this because his father died before teaching him the ritual chants. A whole way of life is lost the generation starting with this boy.

 

Something I also found interesting was that, 'The Pirahã, an Amazonian tribe, appear to have no words for any specific numbers at all but instead get by with relative words such as “few” and “many.”' This may mean that a number system is not inherent to every language.

 

It also talks about a nomadic people in Mexico called the Seri (yes the same spelling as Apple's Seri, but completely different). They are the last remaining group from a time when languages like theirs were more abundant. The article also charges the longevity of these endangered languages with the language speakers themselves. It says that pride will be the savior of these languages. If people have pride in the uniqueness of their language, then they will endure.

 

The article is ended with a beautiful line: "the tongues least spoken still have the most to say."

 

 

 I thought this article was very interesting. I completely agree that just because some of these languages may not be spoken on a large scale, that does not mean that they are not worth keeping alive. All of these languages have a unique view of looking at and describing life. If that language dies, all of the knowledge contained in that language dies along with it. It was really profound to think about.