There are still more than 7,000 languages in the world, but UNESCO predicts that more than half will disappear by the end of the century.
According to UNESCO's Atlas of The World's Endangered Languages, one language disappears every two weeks, meaning 25 languages disappear every year, and if this continues, it will lead to the complete disappearance of 90% of endangered languages.
Fewer and fewer people speak their native language
In large part, language has disappeared because human communication has become more frequent. Since people from all over the world need to communicate with each other, the language barrier creates many obstacles, so humans need to master several of the most widely used languages. The most typical example is that after the advent of the Great Navigation Age, English, Spanish, etc. were brought to the world by maritime traders and colonists, and the concept and status of English as an "international language" gradually took shape. Today, there are as many as 1.3 billion native and second-speaking english speakers.
In today's increasingly globalized world, more than half of the world's population is spoken in just 23 languages.
And those languages used by a small number of people are gradually in a state of extinction because of the low frequency of use. And when a language is no longer learned by children as their mother tongue, the youngest users are getting older, and even the elderly are no longer often used, the language falls into a state of "critical endangerment" and "critical danger". Languages caught up in "critically endangered" and "critically endangered" are usually already used by less than 10,000 people.
ACCORDING TO UNESCO, 96% of languages are spoken by only 4% of the world's population, with an average of one language disappearing every two weeks. According to the Ethno-Language Network, 40% of the world's languages are currently endangered, and many languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people.
There are more than 300 languages in China
China is also a multilingual country, according to statistics, China has 300 languages, of which 128 are minority languages.
From the perspective of geographical distribution, the minority languages in the northeast, northwest, southwest and southeast of the mainland are the most spoken, and there are many ethnic minority people living in these areas, and the languages used are also intricate.
In Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi and other areas with large numbers of ethnic minorities, it can be described as "one village and one language". Like Guangxi Baise Longlin Autonomous County, there are Han, Miao, Yi, Gelao, Zhuang and other ethnic groups living together, according to local media reports, power grid staff need to switch between 5 languages freely, in order to smoothly achieve door-to-door communication.
In china, a wide area has also formed a variety of dialects due to various reasons such as ethnic exchanges and personnel migration.
It is generally believed that there are seven major dialects of Chinese: Northern Dialect, Wu Dialect, Xiang Dialect, Gan Dialect, Hakka Dialect, Cantonese Dialect, and Min Dialect. There are also a number of subdivisions in the various parties, which can be described as "different opinions".
This year's Spring Festival Gala caused a hot discussion of the skit "Happy in It", Jiang Kun spoke of the Cantonese dialect, but as a Beijinger, his pronunciation was still corrected by many people, which shows the depth of the mainland Chinese dialect.
How complex are dialects? For example, the word "sun" alone has 63 sayings and 1079 pronunciations in the country.
In the northwest of Gansu and Ningxia, there are many places that call the sun "Sun head"; near Hebei, some people call it "Lao Ye", "Yang Po", "Yang Po Ye"; and in the southeast coast, people call the sun "Hot Head" and so on. What is more interesting is that in Lianyungang, Jiangsu Province, the sun is called "Taiyin" and the moon is called "Cool Moon".
There are 20 languages in China that are classified as "critically endangered."
At the beginning of the founding of New China, due to the wide variety of languages in various places, today it seems that almost no one can not achieve Full Popularization, until 2000, the popularity rate of Mandarin was only 53.06%, in the past 20 years, with the acceleration of the urbanization process, the popularity of Mandarin has reached 80.72%. With the slow popularization of Mandarin and the improvement of the educational environment in areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, many dialects and ethnic languages have slowly fallen into a state of endangerment.
In the United Nations' list of endangered languages, There are 20 languages that China is listed as "extremely endangered", including White Lao, Northern Tujia and so on.
Even the Manchus, who have a population of more than 10 million and are the third most populous of all ethnic groups in China, have made the Manchu language used by their own ethnic groups classified as "critically endangered." According to the statistics of the Manchu Language and Culture Research Center of Heilongjiang University, there are less than 100 people in the country who speak Manchu, most of them are the elderly in some Manchu villages in Heilongjiang Province, and the younger generation of Manchus no longer speak Manchu.
There are also minority languages that face the same problem, although less endangered than "critically endangered". For example, the Buyi and Miao ethnic groups, even in the southwestern Qianxi Buyi and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Guizhou Province, there are only a few young people who can speak Buyi and Miao, and only children who grow up in ethnic minority villages can speak their own language. The younger generation is becoming less and less able to speak its own language.
How can linguistic diversity be preserved?
In Language Dynamism and Language Endangerment, UNESCO writes that language endangerment may stem from external forces, such as subject languages and educational languages, or from within, such as negative attitudes towards their language within communities. Internal and external pinches force the intergenerational transmission of linguistic and cultural traditions to stop.
On the one hand, the need for social communication makes a country need to establish a standard language; on the other hand, the popularity of a strong language is accompanied by the decline of dialects or minority languages. In this case, how to promote the popularization of Mandarin while protecting the dialect and minority language has become an urgent problem.
First, legal safeguards are adopted. In the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, it is stipulated that "all ethnic groups have the freedom to use and develop their own language and script", and the Law of the People's Republic of China on Regional Ethnic Autonomy also has the provision of "guaranteeing the freedom of all ethnic groups in their own localities to use and develop their own language and writing".
Under the protection of the law, bilingual teaching is used in some ethnic minority areas, such as schools in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and other places, which not only allow children to learn the language and writing of their own ethnic groups, but also allow them to master Mandarin, which is the best of both worlds.
Secondly, in today's increasingly developed technology, there are also new methods of language protection.
In 2015, the "Sino-Chinese Language Resources Protection Project" approved by the Ministry of Finance of the People's Republic of China was implemented, and 1287 Chinese dialect survey points and 430 ethnic minority language survey points were established in 34 provincial-level administrative regions, and the digitization of chinese languages was completed in an all-round way.
The platform has also developed a "hometown dialect" website, where netizens across the country can upload their own language to the Internet and exchange and learn from each other.
The theme of International Mother Language Day 2022 is "Harnessing Technology for Multilingual Learning: Challenges and Opportunities". In today's society with more and more developed technology, the use of cutting-edge digital technology to preserve traditional language culture has become a new idea and new means to save endangered languages.
Today, when a language disappears every two weeks, we need the popularization of standard languages on the one hand, and on the other hand, we also need to retain valuable language wealth. After all, the mother tongue of different ethnic groups is also one of the most brilliant colors of human cultural diversity.