Why Languages Are Dying Worldwide

and how we might aid their survival.

You have been given life on a planet roaring with culture, beauty, knowledge and the most vibrant life in the known universe, with so much waiting for you to discover. Every breath you breathe in this realm will teach you something. Fortunately, you’ve also been provided with language, a medium, through which you can express your unique perception of being.

Without it, your voice is lonely and unheard in the most crowded rooms. We often seem to take this for granted, but unanimously agree that waking up one day and not being able to describe the incredulity of the world around us is unimaginably horrifying.

It isn’t surprising that the world is blessed with thousands of tongues to express the human race’s most intense and astonishing thoughts. However, we often brush aside the fact that language is directly linked to culture, and since they are co-dependent and inseparable, languages, like cultures, are prone to dying out. At the end of the day, language decline isn’t a sudden and intentional boycott; it’s a gradual process that stretches over generations. The youth often is disinterested in their culture because they’ve been exposed to something more relevant and useful, even if it may be less meaningful and elegant. As a member of the youth today, I feel that we more easily find and appreciate meaning in the culture of someplace other than our own. We quickly dismiss the heritage of our ancestors if they don’t immediately appeal to us, so perhaps we are partly to blame. However, there are many other factors at play here as well.

When language doesn’t undergo dynamism in a world rapidly progressing and improving, it becomes irrelevant and unavailing. The problem here is that we are obsessed with the preservation of culture, and not the growth of it. We fear that the languages’ true heritage and purpose will be lost and replaced with newer, shallower versions. Unfortunately, this holding back of the opportunities that ancient cultural languages provide us is causing the dying out of the languages itself. Perhaps there is some hope for the continuity of a language if we risk its modernisation.

This is, however, only one perspective in the world of linguistics. For millennia, people have been migrating to various parts of the planet and away from their homes and cultural lifestyles. They moved to distant places and adopted new, promising ways of life, but carried with them the wisdom of their native ancestry and tongue. The concepts introduced by these migrants are often alien and untranslatable to the locals, and so their cultures weave together, working on borrowed terminology to create better linguistics capable of communicating so much more than they previously could. When languages merge, mix and grow, they become better at expressing the shared human condition. Some words simply have no equivalent in any other dialect, and so we embrace their meaning and use them in our foreign conversations. While vernacular languages may decline in their native settings, there is hope of them thriving in other, merged languages. English is the best example to cite here, as it is known to be the blend of several hundred diverse languages. Its ability to communicate previously unexplainable sensations is largely due to its vast vocabulary and deep-dug roots in hundreds of languages around the globe.

So are we willing to sacrifice the ancient purpose of a language? Can we allow it to journey to the progressing, fluid conversations of today if only through borrowed words and derived meanings?

If you love something, let it go. Give it to the world, to experiment with, to learn from and to fall in love with. If we cannot preserve what we have, at least we can share it and hope it will inspire and teach the world something it never knew before.

And isn’t that what language is all about?

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