Endangered Language Essay

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Mathew R. Mamea Professor Kim Response Paper Ling-102 Language Endangerment An Endangered language is the language that is likely to become extinct in the near future. Many languages are falling out of use and being replaced by others that are more widely used in the region or nation such as English in the United States or Spanish in Mexico. Many other languages are not being learned by new generations of children or by new generations of adult speakers. These languages become extinct when the last speaker dies. In fact, dozens of languages today have only one native speaker still living; and that person’s death will mean the extinction of the language. It will no longer be spoken, or much worse, known by anyone. Throughout my whole life, I’ve only heard of fifty or more languages. A big encyclopedia of these languages where is constantly being spoken or found is none other than films/movies. English or other languages like Spanish or French can be called ‘major language’, because for they have in multitudes of millions speakers. The possible estimation of total languages can be rounded to the near seven-thousands….To me, that is too many languages already. A great majority of the world’s languages are spoken by a relatively small number of people. This is an indicator that the majority of the world’s languages are in danger of becoming extinct and that is the ugly truth. Doesn’t this issue causes one to wonder how did it all comes down to this? The text states that ten thousand years ago, there were approximately twenty thousand languages worldwide. That is really unbelievable. So basically, languages are declining as we move into every New Year or decade. But what factors that allegedly aided the loss of a certain language? I believed that one of the contributing factors to the extinction of a language is outright genocide, which could possibly result
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