It was reported on 4th Feb that the last living speaker of an ancient language in India had died and with her death came the end of that language. The language was Bo – and was one of the oldest languages in the world, thought to be linked to languages used in Africa up to 70,000 years ago. The last speaker was a lady called Bo Sr who had been the only living person using the language since the death of her parents some 30 years earlier. But …..does it matter?

Languages come and go all the time and if that’s the end of another one why should it even be news. More and more people in the world now are speaking the main languages – the United Nations estimates half of the world’s  languages will disappear in less than a century, while half of the world’s people now use one of just eight languages: Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese and French. This means it is much less likely anyone would want to learn (or even be interested in) less commonly spoken languages, and it is perhaps inevitable that some of those languages will disappear. UIC has been teaching foreign languages alongside English for several years now and we have regular classes in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. There is a wide variety of people coming to the classes – but the one thing they have in common is to improve their opportunities.

Languages have always come and gone – after all Latin isn’t spoken by anyone at the moment! But of course, Latin left a legacy through all the Romance languages and their cultures and it does seem to be a different situation when one language – or one culture – changes over time into another  to one being lost completely. It’s also not completely clear what a language is (compared to dialects for example) and there are many different answers to the question of how many there are with estimates of the number of living languages in the world at between 3500 and 10,000! The ethnologue survey puts the number at 6909!

The effect of half the living languages in the world disappearing could be dramatic – Lyle Campbell, a professor of linguistics at the University of Utah says. “Compared with the biology of species, that’s like nothing surviving but the top-ten predators; you can see that the magnitude of losing languages at the current rate will be a catastrophe for humanity.”

But there are many who disagree! isn’t it better for everyone to be speaking the same language – wouldn’t that be a better way to ensure a more harmonious world? Is it a disaster for humanity? This important question – “why should we care?” doesn’t have an easy answer. Perhaps it’s simply that the languages that are disappearing belong to small groups of not very powerful or influential people in the developing world! Perhaps what we do find increasingly though is more people learning a second language – albeit one of the major languages. At UIC we have seen a huge growth in demand for foreign language classes recently- so more people becoming able to operate in 2 or more languages? Is that the future?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2010 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Business, Foreign Languages, Learning English. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.