Journal #7

[Yazmeen Nunez]

The reading for this entry was very eye-opening. Apparently languages are dying out in the blink of an eye? Who knew! I actually have been reading a lot about this phenomenon individually. Particularly indigenous languages of the Americas are being either tossed away in favor of English or Spanish, or slowly becoming extinct because nobody cares to learn them. The main cause of this happening is speculated to be the intervention of colonization, which has cast away the significance of a colonized people's language in order to celebrate the new colonizer's culture by speaking their language. Many people are attempting to save these "dying languages", and it is interesting to see how people are trying to do so; it solidifies the concept that languages are an integral part of culture, and as we've considered with the classification of languages as "direct" or "indirect", they have a major tie with how we perceive one another and how we interact, thus perpetuating such cultural trends.

At the same time, the book also makes a case for the fluidity of languages, how they evolve and change with time and cultures. This is a part of how dialects are formed; you will find that Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Colombia are remarkably different from one another. It was very interesting reading this portion because of my own research on languages. People actually are creating new languages fairly often. Language seems like a natural institution that should never be created with no basis, and many people find disfavor in "slang" or vernacular because it takes away from "proper" or "official" English, but when you look at it relative to time, languages had to have been synthesized somewhere, and although it happened thousands of years ago, it still has been fabricated. Today people are still trying to come up with new languages. Many people are familiar with the language "Klingon", which is based off of a TV-movie series and is actually practiced by hundreds upon hundreds of fans of this series today, although not as their primary mode of speaking. A very recent one is called "Unilingua", or "Mirad" in its own language. It was developed by a philosopher-writer who wanted a basis for simple and logical international communication with no roots in any other world language after studying globalization. This example makes a case for the nature of language: easy to create, easy to alter, easy to destroy.