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The World’s Endangered Languages As the second millenni

游客2024-02-29  13
问题                      The World’s Endangered Languages
    As the second millennium (一千年) comes to a close, more than 6,000 distinct human languages are in use worldwide. Many linguists (语言学家) predict that by the year 2,100, only half of these languages will still be spoken--a less of one language every 12 days.
    Why are languages disappearing? The most fundamental reason is increased contact among formerly isolated human societies. Languages need isolation to develop and to maintain their distinctive characteristics. When isolation ends, local languages tend to disappear along with traditional ways of life.
    Many indigenous (本土的) peoples and linguists are working to halt this trend, which threatens to diminish the world’s cultural and linguistic heritage. Much of a society’s history and culture is contained its language. To lose an ancestral language is m weaken the links to the ancestors themselves. As languages disappear, a wealth of culture, art, and knowledge disappears with them. The world’s many languages also offer anthropologists (人类学家) a unique resource for studying how humans spread across the Earth. Much of what is known about the historical movement of human beings comes from the study of languages that were spoken by ancient peoples of the Earth.
    Assessing Language Endangerment
    Linguists divide languages into three categories by status healthy, endangered, and extinct. A healthy language is one that is currently being learned by children as a first language. Healthy languages are generally used in all walks of life—at home, in school, at work, and in other private and public settings.
    Languages that are endangered are further divided into various levels of endangerment. In the first level of endangerment, in which a language is still considered healthy, the percentage of children who speak the language typically falls below the percentage for adults. If parents stop—or are forced to stop teaching their children their native tongue, the language may rapidly become severely endangered, the next level of endangerment. A sudden shift toward severe endangerment has occurred with many Native American languages and with European languages such as Breton in northwestern France.
    The most endangered languages are called moribund. A moribund language still has native speakers, but it is not being learned by children; often just a few elderly speakers remain. Reviving a moribund language may require extraordinary efforts, including documentation, analysis, and intensive language instruction, languages now classified as moribund include the aboriginal Nyulnyul language in Australia, the Native American Osage language in the United States, and the Finnie tongue of Livonian in Latvia. There are probably about 400 moribund languages worldwide.
    These dying languages may be useful for communicating with older generations. However, they generally lack the widespread usage needed to justify the effort to learn them. Children are efficient language learners, but they also learn quickly which language tools get them ahead and which do not. They will not learn a language simply because their parents or grandparents wish them to; they learn a language to use it.
    An extinct, or dead, language is one with no living native speakers. Dead languages include the Sumerian (闪族人的) language, used by peoples of the kingdom of Sumer in Mesopotamia (美索不达米亚), and Oscan (欧斯干语), a language of ancient Italy. Sometimes a dead language can be brought back to life. Hebrew (希泊来语), an old language that died out in the 2nd century BC, was revived as a dialect tongue in the 19th and 20th centuries; it now serves as one of Israel’s two official languages. The modem language is based in part on the ancient texts of the Jewish Bible (or Old Testament), a collection of documents written largely in biblical (圣经的) Hebrew. The vast majority of dead languages do not have a written form, however, making this type of resurrection (复苏) impossible.
    Why Languages Die
    Languages have disappeared throughout history, but the scale of language death in modem times is extraordinary. Linguists estimate that about half the world’s languages died out in the 500-year period from 1490 to 1990. A variety of factors contributed to this trend of language extinction.
    Historically, the main cause of language extinction has been the movement of people from one region tq another. Humans have always migrated, seeking more favorable lands or fleeing adverse conditions, and they often move into territories already occupied. In some cases, as in India, distinct linguistic and cultural groups coexist (共存) for centuries. More typically, the dominant group displaces the weaker one, either by making the people move, by forcing them to use the new language, or by killing them off.
    In Western Europe, for example, all languages are related with the exception of Basque, which is spoken in north central Spain and southwestern France. Linguists believe Basque is the last of many languages that once existed across Europe and were forced out by the arrival of Indo-Europeans beginning about 2,000 B.C. Indo-European languages adopted few Basque words, if any, suggesting that the groups did not peacefully coexist for any length of time.
    Government policies have also contributed to the decline or death of many minority languages by restricting their use. For example, the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries often took children away from their Native American parents and sent them to boarding schools, where they were forced to learn English. Children from different tribes were typically grouped together so English would be their only common language. Only about half of the 300 native languages spoken in Noah America when the Europeans first arrived are still in use. Australia enacted similar policies to take in native peoples. In the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), many native populations across the nation’s vast expanse were subjected to Russification programs during the 1940s and 1950s. These programs sought to teach children the Russian language and Russian cultural norms at the expense of their native languages and identities.
    Efforts to limit language diversity are still common in some parts of the world. For example, the southeastern African nation of Tanzania (坦桑尼亚) encourages people to abandon their local languages for Swahili (斯瓦希里语), which is widely spoken and officially authorized. This policy, like others in place in East Africa, is designed to encourage a sense of national identity in an ethnically and culturally diverse country.
    Even nations that do not actively seek to speed up the giving-up of local languages typically implement a range of policies that encourage language sameness. All nations, for example, limit the number of languages that may be used in official proceedings. In India, where more than 350 languages are spoken, only 2 are nationally approved: English and Hindi (被印度语). Only a few hundred languages receive official recognition around the world. [br] There are more than ______ human languages in use worldwide.
选项
答案 6,000
解析 文章第一段第一句话“As the second millennium comes to a close, more than 6,000 distinct human languages are in use worldwide．”
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