Learning Journal #8

[Ruofan Jiang]

The history of the world's languages is largely a story of loss and decline. it is quite realistic to expect that half of these languages will be gone, their last speakers dead, their words perhaps recorded in a dusty archive somewhere, but more likely undocumented entirely. What causes this? How do languages come to be spoken only by elders and not children? There are a number of bad answers to these questions. One is globalization. Because when globalization starts to appear, people are more likely to choose to learn the international language, for example, English and then abandon their own language for convenience. For instance, nowadays in China, there are a lot of kids, when they were born, their parents sent them to the called “international school”, which actually is a English school. They will be taught by English and they also talk in English, too. This makes these children are unfamiliar to their mother tongue, Chinese. As a Chinese speaker, I think this is really pathetic. We should be proud of our own language, at this base, we should learn other language.