Vanishing Voices

Vanishing Voices

Liam Liu

Virginia Tech Language & Culture Institute

Vanishing Voices

          What is your perspective of these thousands of languages in the world? An increase number of articles talk about the dying of languages, and a number of people begin to notice these languages die out. As the result, scientist think we must protect these dying languages. People seem to fail to acknowledge that if we just protect something when it is going to disappear, it will never work. People do not really need to protect dying languages for two reasons. First, it is a trend for entire humans to speak one or two major languages in the future. Second is that even people are trying to protect dying languages, these dying languages will die out finally, what we do can just decrease the speed the languages die out.

          It is the trend for humans to speak one or two major languages in the future. Above all, over 70 prevent of people in the world speak just 6 percent of languages, which are more popular than other languages, and over 90 percent of people use these popular languages as first langue. It is the trend for people to speak same language. I have lots of Mongolian friends. We play together and we study together, but I never hear them speak Mongolian. Today, over 85 percent of Mongolians speaker only speak Chinese. For Us Indians, the same thing also happened. Now, most American Indians just speak English, they don’t prefer to use their own language. Therefore, it is not necessary for people to save languages which are dying.

          Moreover, people have no idea how to truly protect these dying languages which have no contribution for the whole world. There are thousands of languages in the world and every 14 days one language will die out (Ryan, 2010). It is important to save all languages. Such languages are typically endangered because their speakers have been assimilated into a larger culture and must learn the language of the larger culture in order to prosper. So we can see for every plan of learning new languages have to spends people lots of time, and if you would never use this languages in your whole life, no one prefers to learn it. Because these dying languages have no contribution  or effect for possessive daily lives, only a few aspects of people will care about these dying languages. There’s another example about unnecessary reason for people to saving languages, Lakritz (2015) said: “no U.S. company exporting food to Canada is going to spend zillions of dollars to include 62 official languages on its products, and there’d be no room on any box or jar for all that.” Whatever we do or not to save dying languages, we still are losing languages as well.