Languages go extinct as the world become more integrated. Languages like English, Mandarin Chinese and Korean gains popularity as their representing countries became the center of commerce and source of culture outsource. On the other hand, cultures with less contact with the world, are getting engulfed by popular influencing cultures. From the reading, we can see that Siletz is going extinct as the number of speakers decreases.
When a language dies, there are impacts on the society and the culture that we might not even know, since the majority of those dying languages are never written down. The history and culture of these languages will become extinct when the last remaining speakers die, and can never be recovered due to their absence in historical archives. Linguists K. David Harrison spoke in an interview on the amount of knowledge that one can gain from learning a new language from species of animals and plants to the climate and weather in the region where they live. Scientists have said that we haven’t found and explored 70% of the organisms on Earth, but this only apply to the languages that we understand. Many of the these dying languages have specific words for species of insects or plants that the common world might not have known, and if these languages dies, knowledges on these organisms will be gone. This implies the potential loss of tremendous amount of scientific knowledge as these languages dies.
Harrison contacted a preservation project through recording and documenting dying spoken languages. Though this practice does not large number of dying languages to be documented in a short period of time. Resurrecting a language is a protracted process, Bud Lane, a tribe member of Siletz Dee-ni, took seven years to work on creating a dictionary for Siletz, with 10,000 odd audio entries made by himself. Now, through the continuous effort made by Lane and many other linguists and scholars, the confederate tribes of Siletz had 4,900 members in 2012, and Siletz is now taught through sixth grade in public charter schools in Siletz. Lane’s efforts shows that it is definitely possible to bring a dying language back to life. Harrison’s work as a linguists also promotes more students to learn about Linguistics and contribute to the effort of saving and recording these dying languages. Professors and scholars have partnered with specific minor languages to build dictionaries in order to preserve not only words but also grammatical structures of these languages. However, like Harrison have said, an language cannot be “exhausted,” meaning that there are infinite possibility to a language. Even if a dictionary is created for a language, but if no one speaks it and understand the culture behind it, the language is arguably not 100% alive.
Replies
It's interesting to see how you found the correlation between center of commerce/source of culture outsources as one of the ways for language increasing popularity ann I really found it cool how in depth you went to the preservation of the Siletz-Dee-ni language preservation process