Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)
Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)
Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)
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improvement are available exclusively in dominant<br />
languages. 40 today, the most dominant language<br />
across the world is English, but Spanish, French,<br />
<strong>and</strong> Portuguese are also languages that have<br />
provided employment for indigenous populations.<br />
in the process of learning a dominant language as<br />
a method of socioeconomic improvement, many<br />
minorities stop speaking their indigenous language<br />
either through disuse or active ab<strong>and</strong>onment, a<br />
phenomenon called social dislocation. 41 Often,<br />
the economic effects of globalization on minority<br />
languages are tied closely to other causes of language<br />
endangerment. Because most African countries offer<br />
no education in indigenous languages, for example,<br />
minority populations must start using the dominant<br />
language if they wish to attend secondary school or<br />
university <strong>and</strong> hold a well-paying job. The dislocation<br />
of a population because of a natural disaster can also<br />
lead to the ab<strong>and</strong>onment of indigenous languages<br />
<strong>and</strong> their subsequent endangerment, as the<br />
speakers often must utilize a different language to<br />
find employment in their new home. 42 Additionally,<br />
globalization can also lead to language endangerment<br />
through exposure to advertising, newspapers, <strong>and</strong><br />
television in the dominant language of the state.<br />
Many indigenous languages lack their own media, so<br />
speakers of these languages are consistently exposed<br />
to information in the dominant language via radio,<br />
television, <strong>and</strong> newspapers, which can contribute to<br />
the disuse of the mother tongue <strong>and</strong> the adoption of<br />
the dominant language. 43<br />
As is obvious in their descriptions, the causes of<br />
language endangerment are by no means mutually<br />
exclusive; in fact, they almost always interact to reduce<br />
the number of speakers of an indigenous language<br />
<strong>and</strong> eventually eliminate the language altogether.<br />
An official policy against an indigenous language, for<br />
example, may reduce the economic opportunities<br />
available in that language, which encourages speakers<br />
to ab<strong>and</strong>on their mother tongue for the dominant<br />
language. Alternatively, the idea that bilingualism is<br />
unhealthy may lead to negative self-perception by<br />
speakers of both a dominant <strong>and</strong> a minority language<br />
<strong>and</strong> cause them to pass only the dominant language<br />
onto their children. Thus, when evaluating an instance<br />
of language endangerment, it is vital to examine all<br />
of the factors, political, economic, <strong>and</strong> psychological,<br />
that have led to the decay of a specific language.<br />
Current Situation<br />
Given the numerous causes for language<br />
endangerment outlined above, it is not surprising<br />
that more languages are nearing extinction than ever<br />
before. There are a number of ways to quantify the<br />
issue of language endangerment, <strong>and</strong> each method<br />
reveals an additional aspect of the problem.<br />
The first way to quantify language endangerment<br />
is by examining the number of speakers of both the<br />
dominant languages that are driving indigenous<br />
languages toward extinction <strong>and</strong> the indigenous<br />
languages themselves. Fortunately, the Summer<br />
Institute of Linguistics (SIL) has been publishing a<br />
book of statistics on language since 1951 entitled<br />
Ethnologue: Languages of the World. According<br />
to an analysis of the Ethnologue by David Crystal<br />
about ten years ago, eight languages (M<strong>and</strong>arin<br />
Chinese, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese,<br />
Russian, <strong>and</strong> Japanese) each have over 100 million<br />
speakers <strong>and</strong> together have nearly 2.4 billion. With<br />
the next twelve on the Ethnologue’s list, the top<br />
twenty languages encompass half of the world’s<br />
population. 44 As Crystal’s analysis was completed<br />
with data from 1999, these figures are even higher<br />
today. the Ethnologue’s 2009 edition reveals that<br />
over 94% of the world’s population speaks 5.6% of the<br />
world’s languages, those with more than one million<br />
speakers. 45 These figures show just how widespread<br />
the international dominant languages have become.<br />
Conversely, the distribution of indigenous<br />
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