There are more than 7,000 living languages in the world, but the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) expects more than half of them to die by the end of this century.
The World Atlas of Endangered Languages, published by the United Nations, reveals that a language becomes extinct every two weeks. This means that 25 languages become extinct annually, and if the situation continues, it will lead to the disappearance of 90% of the languages that are threatened or at risk of extinction.
Although the future and destiny of these languages and hundreds of others seem bleak, specialized linguists and language enthusiasts around the world are making efforts to preserve these languages which are struggling to survive in human speech.
And with dozens of languages dying every ten years, not only grammar, but different ways of seeing the world disappear.
Languages disappear
In his report, published by the French newspaper "La Croix", writer Audrey Dufray said that a few hours of recordings and a few books are all that is left of the language of scolding, a language spoken by the inhabitants of the Black Sea shores. This language disappeared in the early 1990s, with the death of its last speaker. Similar to the scolding language, dozens of languages are not used and every decade dozens of them die quickly, according to some language specialist.
According to the Atlas of Endangered Languages published by UNESCO in 2010, about 2,500 of the 7,000 languages listed have disappeared. Since then, this number has likely grown more.
"When I visited Vanikuru in Solomon Islands in 2005, I found that only two of the original three languages in the archipelago were spoken by very few people," says Alexander Francois, director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research specializing in Pacific languages. For one of them, 12 speak the second language. "
"In 2012, only one of the speakers of the Tanima language and 4 spoke the language of Lunovo," Francois added. The third Vanikuru language, known as Tino, continued to spread gradually to all locals, which contributed to the erosion of the other two languages.
In the same context, Francois, a language specialist, added, "On a small regional scale like this, we note the recurrence of these phenomena in much larger societies as a result of migration and the replacement of one language with another prevailing." It is worth noting that Tanima, Lonovo and Tino represent 3 different forms of the same dialect but 3 different languages.
Writer Dufray indicated that dialect itself becomes a language when someone who does not speak it understands it. For example, the people of Quebec understand the language of the inhabitants of Paris because they speak the same language. But the French and the English do not understand each other because they speak two different languages. The same applies to people who speak Tino and do not understand people who speak Lonovo.
Rapid extinction
The same rapid extinction scenario was repeated in Gabon, with language specialist Jean-Marie Humbert identifying about 20 languages spoken by less than 100 people, and thus likely to disappear, despite the government's efforts to preserve the diversity of languages in the face of the French language that imposed itself under colonialism. According to the specialist in the African language, "people give up languages either because an official language has been imposed by the colonizer or the state, or because the language of the neighbor has a greater social value."
Dufray noted that French regional languages faced the same fate. According to language specialist Jean-Paul Chaffeau, "the twentieth century witnessed severe cracks, in one family, you would find a generation that grew up in the Breton language (an Indo-European language that originated in southeastern Europe in the past and flourished in France), and a generation that only knows the French language." The future is no longer local, but national. We all studied and worked outside the borders of our region, and thus learned a common language. "
She stated that this trend is growing in light of the prosperity of the age of globalization and the distances that are constantly converging through the means of communication and transportation. Currently, learning English is necessary to conduct a dialogue outside the French border.
The author states that to some extent, the image of biodiversity appears to be at risk, as we observe the loss of some local languages little by little. In this context, the researcher Alexandre Francois says, "When a language disappears, a way of seeing the world disappears, because every language shapes its reality and creates its own world according to its needs." Besides, for him, every language is like a watch, all have the same primary role, but not all refer to time in the same way.
Languages get poorer with the death of their speakers
The writer added that the specific differences between similar plants or specific descriptions of very specific and precise weather phenomena depend on vocabulary that only exists between the peoples that deal with them. Therefore, languages also carry the philosophy of their speakers.
In light of this, the linguist at the University of Cologne, Katrina Hood, explains that “in Movima, the Bolivian language that I'm working on, the identifier in front of the name differs if the thing or person I’m talking about is physically present next to me or if he is absent. A way to describe the world that is not in European languages, and every time one of the nearly 200 speakers dies, the language becomes poorer. "
Dufray explained that in Africa, Bantu languages can use up to 25 prefixes to denote "races", masculine and feminine, place, thing and nature, just as Australian indigenous languages previously used expressions of celestial directions, i.e. north, south, east and west, rather than geography based on The speaker, i.e. front, back, right and left.
For her part, Katarina Howd summarizes, "Myths and knowledge about the language can be translated and preserved even if the language dies, but shared history and the construction of the world and culture die with the speakers. Dead language is at best a language without development, frozen as the world continues to progress, and at worst Conditions are a forgotten language, which disappeared with the civilization that I used. "
The author emphasized that, according to linguists, it is the vitality and culture of society that guarantees linguistic vitality above all. For example, Latin, though written down, collapsed with the Roman Empire. On the other hand, according to Jean-Marie Humbert, "In Gabon, there are only a few languages that have a written form developed by missionaries, but this does not prevent oral languages from imparting their knowledge and the stories of their peoples and their lands."