Dying languages

Iramkarapte, e= iwanke ya? That means “Hi, how are you?” in Ainu. But you’ve probably never heard that, or any Ainu. Fortunately, Japan is economically a big country and Japanese is still spoken by 125 million speakers, however, roughly half of the world’s 6,000 or 7,000 languages have been in danger of going extinct including Ainu at the same time. Ainu is a part of Japan, which means we are losing a tiny bit of us. What happens when a language die? Why we must save endangered languages?

One of the reasons is to save ways of interpreting the world. We divide the world by languages and form our own recognition. Imagine a new born baby, he can see things around him, however, he doesn’t know what it is even if it’s his dad’s face or himself in the mirror. It is not that you put a label of language on objects, once there is a language (word), then you can recognize them, which means you’d lose your own world if the language dies.

The second reason is to save the culture and history. We experience plenty of things ever since we were born, at the same time, we hear the words to describe them, understand the world and form ourselves. Also, we develop words and expressions which are not in other languages while living in the same place for a long time. For instance, we cannot talk about four seasons if we adopt the language of the people living in the desert. That can’t be worldwide since the culture, the climate and the social structure are all different. Language itself is a culture and history, that is, they die with its language.

Language is the bellwether. It shapes our understanding of how world works, and it’s hard to maintain the full richness, depth and complexity of a culture without its languages. That’s why we have to save languages. The loss of linguistic diversity leads the loss of biological diversity, and endangerment happens when people are no longer learning the language. So let’s learn languages. Different languages provide distinct pathways of thought and frameworks for thinking and solving problems. Hopefully Japanese exists forever.