Guelph Mercury article by Nazrul Islam
The culture sector of UNESCO recently published a chilling report asserting that more than half of the world’s 6,000 languages are endangered.
It pointed out that 96 per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by just four per cent of the world’s population, that 90 per cent of the world’s languages are not represented on the internet, that one language disappears on average every two weeks, and that 80 per cent of African languages have no orthography.
So how and why does this happen, and what’s the impact of this loss of languages on the social and economic structure of a country?
The disappearance of languages can be attributed to the massive human migration among countries and territories in the modern world. This migration occurs for many reasons, among them the disproportionate population growth in a major-language-speaking society. People move seeking a better life, or to fill shortages of manpower in a developed country with a huge economy. The exploitation of natural resources, political instability, natural or human-made disaster, war and occupation could be other reasons.
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