Language Preservation Assignment | Online Homework Help

11 pages academic paper. 8 pages are already wrote, need 3 pages to complete

Fatoumata Sidibe
Holly Hunt
English 1020

Being born in a country where colonial language has taken over the native language, I have always asked myself why people give more importance to colonial language. Language we have created. Language that define us, our culture, our history, and our tradition, why that language in danger today?  Multiple researches have been conducted about how to preserve language in danger. Some of the researchers that support technology as being the best solution, while others say the library has always been there for things like this. Taye Paul states that “Libraries provides information in either written, electronic or audiovisual form, which play a key role in creating literate environments and promoting literacy by offering relevant and attractive reading material for all” (1). In this paper I will be focusing on the importance of language preservation, what causes language to be in danger, and how to preserve endangered languages.  I will also talk about languages that researchers have been trying to save, and what happens during that process. My research will help readers understand how detrimental it can be when native language is lost, and it will also help those who want to save their language.

A language is in danger when it is on the verge of extinction. According to UNESCO “48.87% languages are in danger (2003).” What causes the death of a language? Well, “languages are threatened by external forces such as military, economics, religion, cultural, or educational subjugation. Internal forces such as a community’s negative attitude towards its own language can also contribute to the death of language (UNESCO, 2003).”  Today, increased of urbanization and migration often cause the loss of traditional ways of life and a strong pressure to speak a dominant language. When a language is spoken only by elderly people and young generations have not been taught to speak it, it is very likely that this language will disappear one day. When two communities of different languages collide, one language typically takes over the other. A language may also die in a country when a government (or during colonization) imposes a different language on the people. In this case a lot of people are forced to abandon their native language. (more examples in the final)

During colonization, colonizers usually imposed or encouraged the dominance of their native language onto the peoples they colonized, even forbidding natives to speak their mother tongues. Many writers educated under colonization recount how students were demoted, humiliated, or even beaten for speaking their native language in colonial schools. Same thing happens in Mali (west Africa) were I am from. French language replaced the native languages in all west Africa during colonization. We had an old teacher in high school who used to tell us that he has always been afraid of white people (French colonizers). Because when they were child it was in the 1940’s. At that time children would see their fathers being tortured because they did not send their children to white sch. It was very important for the colonists to impose a new language on their colonies. The fundamental role of language in the development of human identity has been sufficiently documented. In fact, the human being cannot exist without communicating, eliminating the possibility of communication from the human spirit entails removing its humanity. Frantz Fanon was born in Martine and got his PHD in psychology in France after world war II. Frantz wrote his first book “Black Skin White Mask”. Through Frantz Fanon’s work the importance of language in the human spirit is explored and historical evidence of the use of language as a “weapon for colonization” is given. Frantz Fanon starts his work “Black Skin, White Masks” talking about language. Because he experienced what it means to be left voiceless, he immediately learned that “to speak is to exist absolutely for the other” (p. 17). Colonial language become the dominant language by force.

Why is it important to preserve languages? Bernard and Hale affirm that “the extinction of each language results in the irrecoverable loss of unique cultural, historical, and ecological knowledge. Each language is a unique expression of the human experience of the world” (1998). They then go on to explain how the knowledge we gain from language may be the key to answering fundamental questions regarding our future. When a language dies, so does the “evidence for understanding patterns in the structure and function of human language, human prehistory, and the maintenance of the world’s diverse ecosystems” (Bernard & Hale, 1998). Bernard and Hale also affirm that mainly speakers of the languages may experience the loss of their language as a loss of their original ethnic and cultural identity. When people abandon their language and learn a new one, they often abandon other important aspects -their culture, story, science, even their way of thinking. Every language has its own history, tales, and ways of understanding psychology and science (e.g., traditional medicine). So, when the new language becomes dominant, the new generation will only know the history tied to the dominant language. They will learn science, read books in the new language, and will probably think the ideas of their grandparents are outdated.

Language revitalization is the most important part of this research. A lot of research has been done to find a way to preserve languages, but it is more complicated than we think. When people abandon their language and learn a new one, they often abandon other important aspects-their culture as mentioned above. Everything about their own language will be forgotten, while old ideas can be developed to serve us today. For example, in West Africa (French colony) a lot of people’s native language is Bambara (some may call it Manlike or Djoula). Bambara is in danger now for many reasons, one of them being that everybody studies in French. These citizens force their children to speak only French because the future is in that. Another reason is people are ashamed of their own language. They prefer making mistakes in French than making mistakes in Bambara (their native language). It is important to preserve linguistic, intellectual, and cultural diversity because when we lose these important features there may be no way to recover them. Now, we must save as much as we can before it’s too late.(more details on the final)

Andrew Foley is a Professor, head of the department of English, and director of the division of languages at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Foley wrote about mother tongue education in South Africa. His thesis was that people have a choice in South Africa to learn in their mother tongue, but there are some very real difficulties involved in the implementation of those ideas. Throughout Foley’s research in South Africa, he explains that despite the possibility for students in South Africa to learn in their native language, some parents refuse that option for many reasons. Foley affirms that “in any democracy parental (and learner) choice is paramount, especially when it comes to such issues as the language in which a child is to receive his or her education. It is no small matter that this right is enshrined in the Constitution. If, after all is said and done, parents continue to insist, as the majority currently does, that their children be educated in English rather than their mother tongue, then the onus rests on the State to ensure that this is provided as effectively as possible for everyone who wants it(Foly, 2019).”  How do you save language when most of its speakers choose not to speak it? Language is in danger when there are only few speakers of it, which means there is a dominant language that people give more importance to. People will ask themselves “why should I give importance to an old language that does not give me job, nor anything important for my future?” Parents will most likely go with the language that will secure their child’s life. Young people probably won’t only speak the new language, they will also adopt the culture related to it. At the end of Foley’s research he states that, “no language in education policy which is forced on the majority against its will can ever succeed, and will serve only to perpetuate the unequal and inefficient conditions which currently exist in South African education (Foley, 11).”  This is true – we cannot force people to do what they do not want to, however, it is not only about them.  Prehistorians, anthropologists, linguists, and others also study languages for their research and have found that each of those academic areas will equally be affected by the loss of languages. (will be more develop in the final)

Research has been done by UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Section’s Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages about how to save languages in danger. Since speech communities react differently to language endangerment, UNESCO researchers think that educators and militants should ask for assistance from the speech community. They explain that “such requests related mainly to five essential areas for sustaining endangered languages (UNESCO 7).” The first essential area is “basics linguistic and pedagogical training” which is used to find teachers that already have basic linguistic and language-teaching techniques. The second is sustainable development in literacy and local documentation skills, which involves forming local language teachers to develop writing  if necessary. It also teach them to read, write, analyze their own languages.it will best to open a research center, where speakers of endangered languages will be trained to study, document, and archive their own language materials. Third one is “supporting and developing national language policy”. National language policies must support diversity, including endangered languages. More social scientists, humanists, and speakers of endangered languages should be actively involved in the formulation of national language policies.

Although the first three sections provide useful information, the last two seem to provide the most. Fourth, is the essential area of supporting and developing educational policy.in the sector of education, a lot of linguist are committed to develop mother tongue educational program The last section involves improving living conditions and respect for the human rights of speaker’s community.

Another study is being done by Nicholas Perrault from University of Oxford, Maxwell J Farrell from McGill University, and T. Jonathan Davies from the African Centre for DNA Barcoding at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Their research is also about how to save the most vulnerable languages. Basically, the writers make a relationship between an endangered species and an endangered language and pull on the scientific practices utilized in species conservation to explore ways in which language could be similarly saved from extinction. The authors observe hard data collected by the community devoted to conservational biology and build their method on a similar model for their own research.

As these researchers mention, a biology study has prioritized species based on their “evolutionary distinctiveness” (Perrault et. al., 2017). For example, if a species has many close relatives that might be less important for their research and species with few close relatives might be very important, as they might provide replaceable things. Similarly, the more isolated a language is, the more information it contains. Like phylogenetics trees in biology, which are, essentially a mapping out of the genetic history of a species, dialects are demonstrated as splits in a language tree. These splits help to illustrate that when the isolation of a community and its dialect speaker of one dialect can no longer understand speakers of the other, these splits in the trees help to further isolate the language. Second, they measured evolutionary distinctiveness for language preservation by generating rankings for 350 Austronesian languages. They then measured the global endangerment by measuring the probability of extinction. After this they explain “the effect of missing languages on evolutionary distinctiveness” (Perrault, et al. 5). The result of their research was very interesting. By looking at all the 350 languages. The more the languages have high EDGE (The evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered), ED_R (the relative of evolutionarily distinct) and GE (global endangerment), the more those languages are in danger. There are multiple ways of preserving a language. For languages that are close to extinction, recording is the first step. If you don’t record that language, once the very few speakers of it is lost, there is no way of saving it. “The exercise of ranking languages by both level of endangerment and distinctiveness” is also very important (Perrault, at al. 8). Since we know the languages that are most in danger from this research, we can make saving these languages a priority.

preventing language from disappearing is significant for any human society. This is because language is a major part of human society. It allows us to communicate and it also sustains a vulnerable aspect of culture. It is important to improve and encourage the literature of languages in danger. Writers should be motivated to write in their native languages. If everything about a country are written and documented in dominant language even the constitution, they should be rewritten and redocumented in native language.  The library also preserve language either in written or spoken form. E-library on the internet can translate, catalog, store and disseminating information and access to languages. We should all make sure that no languages will disappear and that all languages will be maintained and perpetuated into the future generations. The reason why we must fortify the diversity of language is, indeed, captured by Navajo elder “If you don’t breathe, there is no air, If you don’t walk, there is no earth. If you don’t speak, there is no world (1992).”

References

Foley, Andrey “Mother-tongue Education in South Africa” Teaching English Today, vol9. No2.November. 2019, URL: https://teachenglishtoday.org/index.php/2010/06/mother-tongue-education-in-south-africa-2/

Olaifa, Taye Paul “Language Preservation and Development: The Role of the Library” Journal of Library and Information science, March 2014, Vol. 2, No. 1;    ,URL:jlisnet.com/journals/jlis/Vol_2_No_1_March_2014/3.pdf

Perrault Nicholas, Maxwell J. Farrell and T. Jonathan Davies. “Tongues on the EDGE: Language Preservation Priorities Based on Threat and Lexical Distinctiveness.” Royal Society Open Science v4.12 (2017).

https://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.aurarialibrary.idm.oclc.org/pmc/articles/PMC5750020/

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Mask. Grove Press,1967.