IHSS Linguistics Blog: Alex Karni

My article is about language loss and how it affects us now and how it will affect us in 100 years from now. The article is about the languages that are spoken around the world and how they could be going extinct in very few years. Places like Papua New Guinea and the Native Americans still hold more than 900 of their spoken indigenous languages. Scientists are only now begging to learn the effects on language loss. Forgetting a language can either be involuntary or voluntary but most of the time its cause is a loss of social identity or as a symbol of defeat by a colonial power. Language loss is a big problem because language is how we tell stories, myths, poetry, greetings, humor, behavior and emotions. Linguists' work in communities where the shift occurring is showing some type of refashioning. Colonial power can take over a whole language in the form of television.

What I think is interesting in this article is how many people in the world do not know anyone except the people that surround them in their daily lives. Not many people know how many different cultures and tribes there are that have their own languages and rituals. So many of them are loosing their customs and languages all together at this very moment because of new innovation and technology and people forget about them. What I do think is a great way to solve this problem is going to these places and teaching the younger generations to learn more about the culture and to contain language maintenance and later language revival. This new practice is new to linguists' but is already saving and striking promise to many different people. 

One detail caught my attention. I learned that there is another way linguists' are helping to save languages. They are recording specific audiotapes, videotapes and even written records. In addition to be helpful in a different way, they write down the translation of a word in a wider spoken language giving reference. I think now if linguists' keep doing the amazing Job they're working on, we could save many languages from extinction. 

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