Holly老師的英語新天地

Task 2: The importance of endangered languages

請注意：此為自由式的進階寫作範本，所以並未套用課程中的模板喔！同學可以先當作閱讀賞析，並從中學習漂亮的句子或片語。

The Necessity of Research

At a pace no less fierce than that of the destruction of the environment and the extinction of species of flora and fauna, human languages too are beginning to vanish all over the world. According to one calculation, by the end of the twenty-first century, half of the approximately 6,000 languages spoken in the world today will have died, and fully 95 percent could be extinct or be on the way to extinction.

The International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People (1995-2004) has spurred strong interest in the issue of endangered languages, and at the urging of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation in particular, concrete action has been launched in various regions around the world. In 1994, responding to a UNESCO request, Japan established an international centre within the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo to gather information on the world’s endangered languages (the International Clearing House for Endangered Languages attached to the Department of Asian and Pacific Linguistics). Through its endangered languages sub-committee, meanwhile, the Linguistic Society of Japan has begun efforts to boost public awareness through, for example, the open symposium on endangered languages held in 1998 and 1999. The 1997 enactment of the Ainu Culture Promotion Law also served to spur moves toward revival of the Ainu language. However, the Japanese public has been slow to recognize endangered languages as a crisis issue on a par with environmental destruction and the extinction of plant and animal species; moreover, Japan’s linguistic researchers also lag far behind their counterparts in Germany, the United States, and other developed countries in terms of formulating realistic responses to the problem.

Each human language is an irreplaceable part of the heritage of the human race. We can define culture as the particular perception (worldview) of a language group (people) in regard to the natural, societal, and supernatural environments of which the group members are themselves a part, as well as that group’s behavioural patterns, or strategies for adapting to element of the natural environment. The definition can also extend to values and semantics, and even to the objects of material culture, all of which are generally linked directly to a people’s world view. In this sense, culture can be seen as one system for comprehending the world. This ‘culture’ is deeply imprinted on all facets of language, and indeed on its smallest details, penetrating language’s every pore. Language is deeply infused with culture. A culture cannot be demonstrated as a single, coherent unit without reference to its linguistic aspect. The languages of each particular group are therefore a form of world cultural heritage on the same level as castles, temples, and shrines, and the ongoing extinction of numerous languages — in the majority of cases, leaving no adequate records of them — is a permanent cultural loss for the human race.

A language is also proof of the unique nature of the group using it. Completely wiping out the languages of minority groups has long been a central pillar of forced assimilation policies. Recent moves by minorities to preserve their tongues reflect their emerging awareness of how dangerously close such languages are to decline and extinction.

Vulnerable languages that are currently endangered are generally those on which research is proceeding far too slowly or not at all. Given the high value and sheer volume of the scholarly information that each of these languages offers towards the resolution of linguistic and ethnological issues, their extinction can only be an irretrievable academic loss.