LANGUAGES OF CULTURE

Languages of Culture

Table of Contents

Introduction4

Discussion and Analysis5

Language change and attrition6

Education and endangered languages6

Education and endangered languages7

Conclusion9

Languages of Culture

Introduction

Language variation is at the heart of sociolinguistics; it is therefore to be expected that sociolinguists might take an interest in linguistic diversity, and that they might be concerned about its loss. The nature of linguistic diversity, how to measure it, and reactions to its decline, are the subject of considerable debate.

Both sociolinguistic research and language documentation share values such as the primacy of authentic recording of natural speech, diversity, and the notion that language is/does more than just the transfer of referential information. In terms of methodology, both use audio and video recordings to produce language corpora. Both are also concerned with the effects of language contact: for example, how a language loses functionality in the face of one or more powerful language(s) of wider communication, and its impact on the structure and vocabulary of the smaller language. Endangered language documentation goes further in that it is concerned directly with recording and maintaining linguistic diversity.

Overviews of the study of language endangerment usually start with a list of statistics about the number of languages in the world, the proportion considered endangered, etc. The validity of such an approach is questionable, as the basis of the estimates is by no means clear. The usual source of statistics concerning the number of languages and their speakers is the Ethnologue', subtitled 'An encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world's 6912 known living languages. Its Introduction recognizes that its headline exact figure is problematic:

Complete information on all of the world's languages is not available; thus the total number of living languages in the world cannot be known precisely. Because languages are dynamic and undergo constant change, there will never be a stable number of the living languages of the world.

Discussion and Analysis

Language communities around the world, especially linguistic minorities, are becoming more aware of the symbolic value of their speech varieties, partly as a reaction to. This has led to an increasing demand for local varieties to be recognized as languages in their own right; to reflect this number in Ethnologies has increased (Cameron, 1992).

Although the number of languages counted is increasing, it is generally recognized that linguistic diversity is decreasing. Throughout history, languages have died out and been replaced by others formed through language contact, or through divergence due to lack of communication over distances (Dalby, 2002). Until recently this was seen as a natural cycle. What worries an increasing number of linguists is the growing number of linguistic varieties no longer being learnt by children, coupled with a tendency for speakers to shift to languages of wider communication, especially varieties of English. Linguistic typologists are concerned that linguistic constructions might disappear without the field even becoming aware that it might be possible to say things in a certain way. For example, there are only a few languages known to have object-verb-subject word order, which before the 1960s was thought to be ...