Vanishing Voices
"One language dies every 14 days. By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?
...Within the next century, linguists think, nearly half of the world’s current stock of languages may disappear. More than a thousand are listed as critically or severely endangered—teetering on the edge of oblivion.
...Does each language have boxed up within it some irreplaceable beneficial knowledge? Are there aspects of cultures that won’t survive if they are translated into a dominant language? What unexpected insights are being lost to the world with the collapse of its linguistic variety? ....."
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in every 14 days ? how can you be so sure?
Posted by: Language | August 23, 2012 at 03:04 PM
If you check the first link in the quoted passage, it is to a National Geographic article on vanishing languages. So the figure of 'one in every 14 days' is from National Geographic.
I simply trust that National Geographic has fact checked their information.
Posted by: Jing-reed | August 23, 2012 at 07:14 PM