Articles and Stories

September 15, 2014

A recent article on MSN read: “Economic prosperity is the worst enemy of minority languages”, listing parts of Australia and North America as hotspots for extinction risk.

“Languages are now rapidly being lost at a rate of extinction exceeding the well-known catastrophic loss of biodiversity,” the US-European research team wrote in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters.

“Small-population languages remaining in economically developed regions are seriously threatened by continued speaker declines.”

“People are forced to adapt the dominant language or risk being left out in the cold — economically and politically.”

These study results come at no surprise. The MSN article talks about native/indigenous languages in the U.S. and Australia. We translate documents on a regular basis into the Navajo language. Very few people remain who can read and write Navajo correctly. If everything around you is in English, and your native language is only used when speaking at home, then you automatically grow up bilingual. English quickly becomes the dominant language. This also happens when a person immigrates from another country and hears mostly English on a daily basis. The native language quickly diminishes and you start speaking a new mixture of the two language. Speaking intelligent sentences in your native language will get harder and harder.

But not only the indigenous languages are at risk, also others. I read several foreign news sites on a regular basis and am always amazed at the number of English words being used in each article. Companies in the U.S. are on the front in creating new technology and coming up with new words describing that technology. Translating these terms is very difficult and coming up with just the right one takes time, but new products move fast. Unless the new term is created by the company which developed or first used the term and presented it in each country, most likely, the English term will be adopted by the country, with maybe only their own prefix or ending added to it.

A brief example: words like ‘texting’, ‘tweeting’… are known around the world and are only used in English. There are many other words that all countries are adopting from the English language thereby changing their native language.

Does it really come as a surprise that our languages change and that indigenous languages are vanishing?

If you would like to read the MSN article, please click on the link below:

http://news.msn.com/world/economic-growth-kills-minority-languages-study