Endangered Languages Should Be Perserved

A famous philanthropist Nelson Mandela once said “If you talk to a man in a language he understand, But if you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart”. Language plays most important role of human beings when it comes to communication. According to the Woodbury, disappearing or endangered language can be defined, as “An endangered language is one that is likely to become extinct in the near future” (Woodbury, 2012). The main reason behind this tragic situation is English becoming more predominant language in the world (Smolander, 2013) and most of the countries use English as their official language in order to make strong relationships between countries in respective to the business, political and cultural perspective (Graddol, 1997). In respect to that more indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing from the world which may lead to fall of history, forget about cultures and traditions and disappear your ethnic identity. This essay is to examine why the indigenous languages become extinct because of the dominance of the English language with respective to the cultural perspective and then later evaluated with possible solutions.

Lose of cultures and traditions is one of the considerable issue nowadays due to language dying. Many researchers has acknowledged that more knowledge that has been acquired by native aboriginal people are now getting dissolve. As stated in Global language viability, Grimes has mentioned about Huichol people in Mexico that they carry vast knowledge about the flora and fauna in their region. Even the reference book did not give that much information to them. Huichol people tend know each and every behavior of animal by looking at their foot prints, carcass and sometimes they can express animals behavior with regards to the season of the year (Grimes, 2001). But unfortunately researchers were unable to collect more data because their Spanish was very limited. There are about 35724 Huichol people lives all around the world and their language is at vulnarable stage (Paul , 2009). What their main concern was these kind of tresure troves are at risk of getting extinct each time a language dies (Grimes, 2001). (Nettle & Romaine, 2000), for instance, has ellaborated that New Guinea and tropical Africa are the richest in biolinguistics diversity in the world. Besides that thoses regions are inhabited by indigenous people who represent the 4% of the world’s population and but speaks at least 60% of its language. These people represents knowledge in their region’s diversity in ecosystems, species, cultures, and languages. They have their own relationship with the nature where all the facts and behavior are bound to their language and cultures. They know how to explain in their mother tongue but there aren’t much people who can understand their languages. As per Nettle and Romaine these languages are at risk of disappearing with knowledge that they have been collecting over past few generations (Nettle & Romaine, 2000).

Many linguists came up with possible solutions to avoid language dying. (Romaine, 2007), for instance, has cited that linguists or the responsible authorities should have analyzed languages which are close to being endangered and try to revitalize and stable it. By that particular way language daying can be terminated. As an example Romaine has explained that how Hawaiian acted to preserve their language. Language nests were built in order to interact young generations with fluent elders and caretakers. In Hawaii, English is introduced from the 5th grade and most of the people learn Hwaiian as a second language in order to save Huwaiian language for younger generations. In Basque country, Basque and Spanish are used to taught as a subject during primary school and as a third dialact English is taught in kindergarten. And also Kahnawake survival school in Quebec were built to preserve Mohawk language cultures and history by the government.

With the development of the Information Technology numerous linguists have come up with numerous solutions to preserve endangered languages. For instance, (Brownlow, 2005), has cited that use of digital technologies plays a huge role in the preservation process when papers based preservation not feasible and take lot of space, time and money. Also she has demonstrated that there are so many viable solutions that has been used by the organizations to sustain dying language with the help of specialized people in linguits. As an example, PARADISEC also know as the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Languages provides new features for preservation of written and oral linguistic materials, music and images of aspect of the traditions and cultures. They helps in digitalizing the paper based storages, collect pysical perserved information such as images magnetic tapes into large databases which is more advantageous to future researches. Their main purpose was to get rid of old presavation memthods such as magnetic tapes, paper based materials because those are prone to mould and degradation. In order to use that digitalized content they have created digital archives of language resources and network of interoperating online repository sevices for access the content from anywhere in the world. Some of the other oragnizations such as AILLA (The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America) and ASEDA (The Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive) provides the same operations but its more focused into cultural and traditional specific. Also Brownlow has mentioned a particuler software piece callled ‘kirrkirr’ which is use to store images, sounds, synthetic and phonetic information. Furthermore author has specified the special feature of this software such as kirrkirr is searchable in both English and the specific language as well as sound recording of pronounciation, visual illustrate of natu of lexicon; synonyms, antonyms, related words, alternate forms, collocations etc. and it also XML comatible and it can be used with any other dictionaries which is XML compatible and Kirrkirr is completely freeware so every language enthusuastic can use it for research (Brownlow, 2005). Zaraysky has mentionted that most american companies pay extra money and give promotions to people who know more than one language (Zaraysky, 2014). By considering all the solutions mentioned above can be easily use to preserve a dying language.

In conclusion, endangered languages should be perserved. Numerous linguists have cited that preservation of language is crucial in order to transfer knowledge about cultures and traditions to next generations. Furthermore, there so many problems were stated regarding the disappearing languages and should probably need to analyze, identify and recover before a lanugaue hits the vulnerability stage (Romaine, 2007). And so many organizations are on their way to make permanent solutions in order to protect it from being disappear.