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Article: Endangered languages - Lost worlds.
- Article from:
- Contemporary Review
- Article date:
- December 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ON the best current estimates, the human race is losing two of its languages every month. There are now about 6,500 left.
This is no small thing, for every one of those languages is the expression of a unique world-view. We are not talking about dialects here: each one is a separate way of speaking, such that only those brought up with it can truly understand it. Each one of those world-views has formed the lives of over a million people, for any language must have existed for thousands of years, just to become a separate language. So each language embodies the memory of hundreds of generations: and so, when the time comes that a language is lost, the community ...