According to the linguist Claude Hagège, it is estimated that every year around the world, about 25 languages were buried with the death of that language’s end-users. And a recent study shows that there are more than 3,000 languages in the worldwide are under threat, which is about half of the languages spoken globally. When a language disappears, the world loses a way of thinking, a way of seeing the world around us.
Unlike conquering a country or destroying an economic system, language – is not something that can be easily erased. Journalist James Griffiths once said in his book ‘Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language”: “Languages are not lost, they can only be acquired. They are uprooted by repression or indifference, speakers assimilated into a new language, or left to grapple in an increasingly dim space.”
Indeed, a more realistic example of that particular language end-users or so-called “the final storytellers” is mentioned in the Korean context that most of them are living alone. They know that they have long been abandoned in the center of their mother tongue, in the middle of the vast universe. Losing your mother in the middle of a noisy market and crying won’t do anything. All the things that have died and survived, only themselves with those extremely beautiful and delicate “speech”, they alone can’t stand it. They also hoped for a miracle that someone would open the door and greet them in the language of their tribe, but it did not happen…
Words are reflected in sound and then in spirit. Love is a linking word for a certain people and an adjunct to a neighboring country. However, for some other tribes, they have not labeled yet, so no one will know who they are or what their language is.
For each of us living in this world, the mother tongue is probably the breath, the thought, the tattoo of each person, so it is not something that can be easily erased or forgotten. quit for a reason suddenly “don’t want to do it anymore”.
If a language disappears, linguists fear that the village will lose the unique thinking, history, culture and nuances of its speakers. Protecting ethnic minority cultural languages is protecting a natural resource, a living museum, and a source of tourism to help develop the country’s economy and mark the country’s sovereignty. Ethnic minority languages and cultures are also a living intangible heritage that needs to be preserved. “Don’t lose even a minority”.
Nhat Minh.
