On Endangered Cultures and Languages, the Rise of Globish, and Bilingualism

November 19th, 2010

I watched this presentation on TED.com months ago from photographer, Phil Borges about the loss of endangered languages and cultures and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The photos, personal stories, and statistics that Borges shared blew me away, especially the opening paragraph:

A fact came out of MIT, couple of years ago. Ken Hale, who’s a linguist, said that of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren’t spoken by the children. So that in one generation, we’re going to halve our cultural diversity. He went on to say that every two weeks, an elder goes to the grave carrying the last spoken word of that culture. So an entire philosophy, a body of knowledge about the natural world that had been empirically gleaned over centuries, goes away. And this happens every two weeks.

As the world increasingly speaks English, or Globish as some people call Global English, as a lingua franca with one another, we also lose the diversity of smaller cultures and languages. English may facilitate more efficient communication and understanding with a greater number of people, but what have we lost by abandoning the “minority” languages?

Since my last post about the influence of Spanish-language teachers in the U.S., I’ve been thinking about the importance of bilingualism. If other countries foster learning second and third languages, why can’t we? Americans are just as smart, aren’t we? Understandably, we have less of a need to learn a foreign language as the U.S. is so large geographically, English is #1 in the world, and our neighbor to the North also speaks English. In contrast, you can speak multiple languages in Europe within a day’s drive. Could this change as Spanish becomes more prevalent with the growth of the Hispanic audience?

This report also especially got me thinking about the importance of speaking two languages: Bilingualism delays onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms.

Watch Phil Borges’ entire presentation here, filmed in 2006, but discovered by yours truly in 2010:

  • Sangjin839

    Hello? see you again!

  • Anonymous

    With regard to the campaign to save endangered and dying languages, can I point to the contribution, made by the World Esperanto Association, to UNESCO’s campaign.

    The commitment was made, by the Esperanto Association at the United Nations’ Geneva HQ in September.
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7vD9kChBA&feature=related

    Your readers may be interested in http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva. Please also see http://www.lernu.net which is currently receiving 120,000 hits per month.

  • Editor

    Interesting concept. The challenge is that according to those who monitor and chart this type of information many high school graduates today can barely read and write or do basic math so adding an additional language may be quite an accomplishment. See http://www.hispanicmpr.com/2010/08/16/latino-students-reading-math-test-results-improve-somewhat/

  • http://TheDailyJoe.net joekutchera

    Elena,
    Regarding your article, it’s true Latinos may be “behind” in reading and writing. And yes, there’s a lot of work to be done to reduce the drop out rate and advance the skills of Hispanic students. But, many bi-lingual households speak both Spanish and English comfortably, even though they may not read/write at their grade level. That’s a key distinction

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