This article discusses the global crisis of language extinction and the efforts being made to preserve endangered languages. It highlights the importance of language to cultural identity, history, and community.
A Rohingya child writes in the Hanifi script at a school in Kutupalong refugee camp, near Cox’s Bazar. Books written in the script have been distributed to more than 500 Rohingya schools in Bangladesh.With half of all languages predicted to die out in decades, activists are turning to online tools to preserve them very year, the world loses some of its 7,000 languages. Parents stop speaking them to their children, words are forgotten and communities lose the ability to read their own scripts.
The rate of loss is quickening, from one every The UN’s culture agency, Unesco, says predictions that half the world’s languages will have died out by the end of the century Some languages are disappearing with their last speakers, but thousands are endangered because they are not being spoken widely enough or are not being used in formal settings such as schools or workplaces. A quiet fightback is under way in communities that feel their traditions are drowned out by the dominance of the most spoken languages globally, such as English, or by the official languages of their country. Tochi Precious, a Nigerian living in Abuja who helps endangered language activists, says: “It pains my heart every day to see that a language is dying off, because it’s not just about the language, it’s also about the people. “It’s also about the history associated with it and the culture. When it dies, everything linked to it dies off too.”Igbo chiefs at Chinua Achebe’s funeral in 2013. The lauded writer embodied tensions between Nigerian oral traditions and colonial languages’ ability to reach a wider audience.Precious says it was the community aspect that brought her to join efforts to save Igbo, a west African language that was predicted to become extinct by 202
LANGUAGE EXTINCTION LANGUAGE PRESERVATION CULTURAL DIVERSITY COMMUNITY TRADITION
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