Linguistics

Posted: August 7th, 2013

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One article in particular speaks on a country affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake that resulted in the devastating tsunami. The negative effects of the tsunami affected a nonmember of the classic community countries. These language communities included India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Somalia and Maldives. The main language communities to have been affected by the tsunami include those that speak English, and a larger share includes those that speak local tongues such as Kiswahili at the Kenyan coast. These language communities were mainly affected by a common problem of loss of property and or displacement by the raging tsunami floods. At the extreme, reports of death were made but these affected to people had little or no knowledge concerning the tsunami.

According to Crystal David, certain languages are facing imminent decline as their use becomes increasingly diminished. Or rather, begins to decline. Crystal maintains that languages should be regarded as organic entities that undergo through a predetermined life cycle of birth, infancy, maturity, and the slow but sure death and decay. The decay of a language normally occurs when its users abandon it. In his “Language Death” book, Crystal David discusses valid measures designed to help a language progress rather than decay. He maintains that the process of language decay will cease if its users are capable of writing it down, can use electronic technology, increase their community prestige, have a strong education system presence, and raise their legitimate power within the dominant community. In my view, Crystal’s solutions to decaying languages have a good chance of working. In particular, I that those languages the main factor of language decay happen when its users abandon it, both in speaking and writing. Crystal’s solutions revolve around promoting increasing use of the endangered language and therefore have a chance of working.

‘Folkloraization’ of a language implies no longer using the heritage of a language for communication purposes but a mere symbol and in limited situations. However, languages are not capable of being maintained from symbolic functions alone. Ultimately, this poses a major threat to dominated languages. In this regard, this leads to the emergence of another language for communication sake. These new kinds of language hybrids are normally spoken in informal situations. To a certain extent, the grammatical matrix composing these hybrid varieties leads to the insertion of inflections or words into legitimate languages thus comprising their originality. This effect plays a major role at the decaying process of a language as stated by Crystal.

For any given state, minority languages are seemingly taken to yield negative issues rather than positive. The stronger the minority language becomes the less the nation becomes united. Nations such as Kenya are plagued by their minority languages because they are granted excess recognition and freedom. It ha been established that nations with suppressed minority languages are known to be more united. Therefore, one main reason why people go to high extremes for purposes of suppressing dominated minority languages is to foster unity and harmonious living. In this case, having a common language implies that society moves towards a common bearing and there is better understanding among members of that particular society. On the other, having a society dominated by minority languages often has more conflicts due to the different language bearings. Countries such as Russia, Turkey and China have succeeded in suppressing minority languages and such problems are hard to come by.