What Causes Language Death

The point of this paper is to show the current state of languages worldwide, the reasons due to which language death is happening, the severity of itsthe consequences it causes and the ways through which linguists can, in the end, save the day with the help of the government, the responsible institutions and the

She is bringing up the term of the “global village phenomenon”, stating that “the invention and spread of agriculture, the rise of colonialism, later the Industrial Revolution, and today globalization, electronic technology, etc., have created the global village phenomenon”. She continues by saying that European and Asian languages have somehow conquered the world and that Africa and China are gradually being put in the same state; proving that the global village phenomenon has not shown its spectrum yet. On the other hand, it seems interesting too to mention one more different, sociolinguistic approach, which is adopted by Mekacha (1993). Mekacha raises the issue of the “dominant/minority dichotomy”. Seen under the sociolinguistic perspective, he suggests that the dominant language will be the one spoken by the “dominating social group”, in contrast to the minority language, which will be spoken by the “dominated social groups”. Last but not least, one more standpoint expressed by Wurm (qtd. in Crystal, 1999) gives out something extra. He supports that in a metropolis, “the monolingual metropolitan culture” is imposed on its inhabitants, giving them only one choice; that of speaking the dominant language and dissuading them from being bilingual. Therefore, “endangered minority languages” are being underrated by this

Crystal in Language death emphasizes that an ecosystem functions properly when there are living organisms within it and interact. Analogously, the same thing happens with languages. The damage or even worse the destruction of the smallest living organism or of a language that is spoken only by a tiny percentage of people can have severe effects and dreadful consequences. “Diversity has a central place in evolutionary thought, where it is seen as the result of species genetically adapting in order to survive in different environments” (Crystal, 1999). As a result, if ecological diversity is necessary for the planet to be balanced, linguistic diversity is equally important for a “successful