Saving Indigenous Languages

Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=saving+indigenous+languages

2019 has been dedicated to raising awareness about indigenous language.

Among other things, the survival of a language depends on the prosperity and political influence of the community which speaks it. Some five to seven thousand languages are spoken in the world today and the majority of these are the mother-tongues of indigenous groups. Linguists fear that in the next hundred years many of these languages will simply vanish. To the indigenous groups who speak them, these languages are more than a means of communication; they confer on their speakers a sense of identity and uniqueness.

It is through language that we communicate with the world, define our identity, express our history and culture, learn, defend our human rights and participate in all aspects of society, to name but a few.

Through language, people preserve their community’s history, customs and traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking, meaning and expression.  They also use it to construct their future. Language is pivotal in the areas of human rights protection, good governance, peace building, reconciliation, and sustainable development. Language is about who we are. Losing our language means losing our culture, how we see our place in the world and how we connect and communicate with those who came before us and those who follow us.

Many of us take it for granted that we can conduct our lives in our home languages without any constraints or prejudice.  But this is not the case for everyone. Of the almost 7,000 existing languages, the majority have been created and are spoken by indigenous peoples who represent the greater part of the world’s cultural diversity. Yet many of these languages are disappearing at an alarming rate, as the communities speaking them are confronted with assimilation, enforced relocation, educational disadvantage, poverty, illiteracy, migration and other forms of discrimination and human rights violations.

Along with income inequality and income concentration, our world also suffers from great language inequality and concentration. Some ninety-seven percent of the world’s population speaks a mere four percent of the world’s languages. The current trend is for this four percent of languages to crowd out completely the remaining ninety-six percent. There are numerous reasons for this tendency.