Manifesto.doc

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 2012

The proposition 'When a language dies, a culture dies' gives a reason for preserving endangered languages, but raises valid questions in light of recent work on multilingual communities and on the conservatism of some aspects of language use in situations of language shift. It is claimed that these objections are met if the proposition is revised to say that interrupted transmission of an integrated lexical and grammatical heritage spells the direct end of some cultural traditions, and the unraveling, restructuring, and reevaluation of others. In support of this, it is argued that in situations of language shift, ancestral and replacing languages are not equivalent vehicles for cultural maintenance or expression. An extended empirical case is made on the basis of Central Alaskan Yupik Eskimo demonstrative use.

The last speakers of probably half of the world's languages are alive today. As they grow old and die, their voices will fall silent. Their children and grandchildren -by overwhelming majority -will either choose not to learn or will be deprived of the opportunity to learn the ancestral languages. Most of the world's languages have never been written down anywhere or scientifically described. We do not even know what exactly we stand to lose -for science, for humanity, for posterity -when languages die. An immense edifice of human knowledge, painstakingly assembled over millennia by countless minds is eroding, vanishing into oblivion.

GLOBALISATION AND ECOLOGY OF LANGUAGES 1 ABSTRACT As many experts and theoreticians in the field of linguistics have already predicted, during the last two decades, English has become the world's most widely spoken language for trade, education, business and tourism (Graddol, 2001). One may have a tendency to ask himself why the spread of the English language seems very difficult to stop, but on the other hand can be controlled for a productive outcome to the world. Perhaps the most obvious reason is the sheer necessity of the commodity in relation to other languages, and as such, its importance should be harnessed in order not to also cause endangering to minority languages-thus promoting a near perfect, if not a perfect ecology for the world's languages. This essay examines the factors necessary not to endanger what is seen as minority languages in the world at a period of English language globalization. 2 INTRODUCTION It is arguably clear that most loss of a language has not been self-evidently life threatening. Neither has it attracted much attention as compared to other phenomena like climate change, hunger and the likes. This could partly be because enough effort is not carried out to make people conscious of the gradual, but the painful nature of the consequences of language extinction. In our everyday lives, we tend to pay greater attention on economic and other factors which affect us directly than the subtle influence of our languages. Most syllabus in our schooling probably focus on the physical sciences, business studies and a host of familiar fields than that of our language ecology and the factors that mitigate against it. A major factor of language which, if not controlled with the right policy framework can, and has been described as killing and endangering other minority languages is the system of language globalization; the growth of a language to an international or worldwide scope. On the first guess one may ask how a language growth in the international arena could possibly pose a threat to others, and this is addressed in detail in this essay. Naturally, since humans are associated with different forms of activities on a daily basis and these interactions deals with fellow humans, our respective languages come into contacts automatically. Haugen (1972:35) defined language ecology, as 'the study of interactions between any given

Anthropology & Education Quarterly

Contemporary Sociology, 2016

2015

Scholars have written extensively on the processes and effects of globalization, documenting its many dimensions including economic, political, ecological, cultural, and ideological. That said, there is little found in the published literature on the relationships and interactions between globalization processes and language. This paper will provide new insights into the roles that languages play in today‘s globalizing world. In the public mind, there are two predominate scenarios about the roles and outcomes of languages in the globalizing world, and the English language is implicated in each one. In the first, English is spreading everywhere and causing the extinction of the world‘s languages (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Phillipson 1992). In to this scenario, English has been characterized as a weed, a Tyrannosaurus rex, the ‗killer language‘ in a language-eat-language world driving the planet to the brink of unprecedented and dangerous uniformativity and conformativity. The alter...

2002

The typical academic discourse on language endangerment has presented languages as anthropomorphic organisms with lives independent of their speakers and capable of negotiating on their own the terms of their coexistence. Not surprisingly it has become commonplace to read about killer languages in the same vein as language wars, language murders and linguicides. I argue below that languages are parasitic species whose vitality depends on the communicative behaviours of their speakers, who in turn respond adaptively to changes in their socio-economic ecologies. Language shift, attrition, endangerment and death are all consequences of these adaptations. We must develop a better understanding of the ways in which one ecology differs from another and how these dissimilarities can account for variation in the vitality of individual languages. Globalisation is discussed as part of the relevant language ecology. I submit that only local globalisation has endangered or driven * This article...

2000