One way to preserve a language is by utilizing social media and appealing to youth.
YouTube / Create Your Voice
Even in this day and age, languages are in danger of becoming extinct. It’s perhaps not a subject that is at the forefront of modern thought for most. Even in the most commonly spoken tongues, words and expressions change with the times. It’s an inevitable fact. Languages are constantly morphing just as vocabularies are borrowed and incorporated into each other. Words and idioms disappear, and so do ideas, thought patterns and whole cultures and histories.
Facebook / Escuela Ikuari
With so many people speaking the topmost spoken languages (Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi and Arabic being the top five), consideration for those that are lesser known is often left to those diminishing number of speakers of endangered languages, as well as, some language scholars who can hopefully capture, catalogue and preserve some part of hundreds, if not thousands of languages and cultures that are dying out.
As related by NPR on July 11, without preservation of endangered languages, or even attention to those languages, much is lost. Being a method of communication, language is also a catalyst in which ideas are formed, understanding is created and cultural information is housed and shared. For example, there is no replacement for a word like iya, a word in the endangered Latin American language Kukama which means “heart” and also “fruit.” The correlations between the two ideas of heart and fruit as understood by those who speak Kukama are lost if the word is lost. “Without the language, the culture itself might teeter, or even disappear,” writes BBC in regards to Cherokee which is also endangered.
Why is protecting languages important, even when perhaps 100 or a few handfuls or even less speak these languages? The BBC reports that “most linguists estimate that 50 percent of the world’s remaining 6,500 languages will be gone by the end of this century,” with some estimates going as high as 90 percent. That means there is a possibility of humans at some point becoming monolingual. It seems like a good idea, perhaps, but what happens when there are no words to describe one’s experience and heritage which differs from that of someone on the other side of the world, let alone on the other side of the country or city? Whatever boons and bits of wisdom that are contained in the world’s expiring languages would die out, plain and simple. Culture would become a homogenized thing.
BBC confirms that languages are “conduits of human heritage.” They also contain within them the mindsets and social mores of the cultures that use them. Think of the Iliad and folk songs from all over the world that have been passed along orally. Think of prayers, many of which would not be known today had someone not recorded and preserved them in their native tongues.
Just as monopolies place limitations on the masses and just as the potential is there for those monopolies to exploit their power over those who use or need their products, a world that is not linguistically diverse risks the same danger of becoming limited and exploited by the rule makers of one overarching lingua franca. Still not concerned? Consider the potential of how languages can shape the way people think.
One way to preserve a language is by utilizing social media and appealing to youth. In the video above, a teen and her friends rap about their native tongue Kukama. The video has received more than 200,000 page views between its multiple postings online. It has brought attention to a dying language along with an Indiegogo campaign, a school dedicated to teaching the language and books being written to preserve the language.
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