Culture Terror

“Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century.” (John, Wilford) The language spoken by the largest amount of people in the world is mandarin but that is just because of the sure size of Hong Kong. One of the most widely spoken languages in the world is English. Living in northern California has given me perspective on the English language, having taken three years of Spanish in high school and two semesters of Japanese in college I have been able to look at the way people handle the language.

Japanese taught me more about English than any other class I have taken. When I learned Japanese it was translated from English which is no surprise. But when you start breaking down the sentence structure and converting it to Japanese you realize how much more simple languages can be. My impression of the Japanese spoken language was that it is much more functional and if nothing else straight forward. There did not seem to be a need for fifty different ways to say the same thing. As I sat in my class every day I just felt bad for Japanese students who had to learn this horrible language called English.

There is no doubt in my mind that the reason that English is so wide spread is because of us, the United States and England. One super power and one former, these two countries are still large centers of commerce and still have a lot of large banks and popular stock exchanges. When you are getting into international business it seems that everyone at some point chose to just accept the fact that it would be too difficult for Americans to learn the five or ten different languages that might be required to sell their products. Is this a bad thing? Yes probably because the only thing keeping languages alive in some cases is the pride of a country to keep their identity, but how many generations will that last. As the world becomes closer with the internet wont it push people even more towards English as their first language?

In my multicultural literature class this semester we have read authors who all have English as a secondary third or fourth language. Whether it was Ishiguro or Rushdie you can tell from their writing that they are thinking in a different language or at the very least influenced by one. This makes their books brilliant to read; the way that they express themselves is far different from most British or American authors, for me it mainly came out in the sentence structure, they had a certain feel to them. But even if English was their first language I really do not think that the stories would change much, just because the language changes does not mean that the country will.

When I hear about a language dying off it no doubt makes me sad, but I also hardly ever hear about it. It just doesn’t seem to be a priority today and I really don’t know if it will become a priority ever. When I think about all of a people dying along with their language all I can think of is the lost history that could happen all the writing that was not translated and all of the voices that will be lost.