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Languages go extinct when there are no speakers of that language left. When a language dies, we lose history and culture that the language belongs to. From the reading, in order to help preserve a language, creating a pool of speakers large enough to maintain its existence seems to be the key. One way linguists can help to preserve a language is by helping to create a dictionary for a weakening language. I think any form of public exposure of these rather "hidden" languages can help to preserve the language in the future. 

I think a "dead" language definitely can be brought back to life just like the Siletz language as long as there are some resources to work with. Nowadays, language studies are a lot more common than before. As long as there are people interested in studying the language and the speaker pool continues to grow, its language, culture, and history can be preserved. Like dictionaries, any form of documentations can be used in researches and studies of that language, but those documentations are necessary for the process to start. In addition, it will take a long time for the speaker pool to grow and may take multiple generations, but it is possible. 

How do languages go extinct? Respond to the readings, and reflect on what happens when a language dies? How can linguists help preserve a language? Can a ‘dead’ language ever be brought back to life?

According to David Harrison, there are about 7000 languages, and half is expected to go extinct at a rate of one language every two weeks. Because 80% of the world's population speaks the major languages, which consist of about 84 languages, there are thousands of languages that are on the verge of becoming extinct. There are many reasons why a language can go extinct. One is because the speakers of a certain language are taken in by a dominant language or group. When there are no speakers left, the language is essentially dead. Passing down an obscure language to the next generations becomes difficult and unpredictable especially since children may choose to stick with another language. When a language dies, some aspects of a culture is lost. It is unfortunate to see a language that has ties to one's cultural identity, past, etc. die.

It is possible to help preserve a dying language and even resurrect a dead language. With the help of linguists, an American Indian tribe whose language, Siletz Dee-ni only had 5 speakers left, was able to create a dictionary that helped record and preserve the language. Now, it is being taught until sixth grade at a public charter school in Siletz. 

    One of my learning goals of interpretive listening is to be able to watch and understand a movie in Korean without using subtitles. In order to work on this goal, my learning partner and I watched the Korean movie Along With the Gods 2. I chose this movie because I watched the first movie without subtitles and did fairly well in understanding the story. Therefore, I wanted to challenge myself again by watching part 2 without using subtitles, too.

    This movie is a little difficult to understand fully even with subtitles because it uses vocabulary that is not commonly used. However, I was able to remember the terminology used in the first movie, which allowed me to make connections. I also learned even more vocabulary through the second movie. I also increased my understanding of the topic because of my prior knowledge of watching part 1 of this movie. Overall, this was an interesting movie and it helped me to increase my listening comprehension skills.

    In the future, I can practice this goal by watching more videos and/or movies in Korean without subtitles!

In a world where English is ever-prevalent all over the world – on the internet, on television, in books, in airports, virtually anywhere and everywhere – it is no surprise that less prominent languages can die out under its shadow. Languages spoken by indigenous groups with a very small community of speakers face huge risk of extinction. First and foremost, the amount of people you can speak to and utilize that language with is greatly diminished. If you are forced to use English the majority of the time and rarely get the chance to use your other native language, it will be very hard being immersed in it. In cases like the article mentioned in which Native American children were forced into public schools that “aimed to stamp out native ways and tongues,” generations of Natives are taught to never learn their mother tongue and have incredibly restricted usage.

But there are other factors as well. As discussed by David Harrison, many of these languages’ speakers are elderly. The younger population have not inherited the language from their elders, and the last speakers of the language face the risk of passing away without the language not being passed on.  Even in the case of linguists who want to document these languages so that they do not become extinct, it is difficult being able to communicate with elderly people because of issues with geriatric health, like deafness or hardness of hearing. Without being able to communicate with these speakers, you cannot retrieve the knowledge they can potentially impart. The language is not transmitted and dies out. In addition, younger generations may be impacted by low self-esteem as Harrison also mentioned, thinking English may be a superior language or that their parents’ native language is unworthy of being learned. This again is also connected to what Native American children experienced in their public schools, with their native tongues being forcibly ignored and stamped out.

Linguists can help preserve a language the same way Bud Lane is doing with his online Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary and David Harrison did in his recordings of native languages in Siberia and other indigenous cultures as well. It is important for pieces of language to persevere so they can be picked up again. It is through this record that a dead language can be revived again.

Languages go extinct when there is no people left to speak it and there is no passing the language down to descent groups. When a language die, it carries sounds that are distinct to the language, the cultural practices associated, and we lose meaning in the sense that words convey a certain worldview. Linguists, such as Dr. David Harrison, has helped the Siletz tribe in Oregon to build their dictionary. Other nonprofit organizations have partnered with the tribes to preserve the language and cultural artifacts. A dead language does have possibility of being brought back to life. For example, the article mentioned that the Siletz Dee-ni language only had about five speakers left, but with consistent help from linguists and organizations, they have helped the language revive. By building dictionaries, teaching it in schools, making the language sound “cool,” they have helped with enlisting new members.

Based upon the readings, it seems as if languages go extinct for two primary reasons. First, as the NYT article notes, many local native languages are under threat because of globalization. The article identifies English, Spanish, and Mandarin as “winners” of this global movement because of their prevalence across knowledge. I would agree with this statement because English is a very prominent language in conducting cross-cultural business. Based on my own experience in business, I’ve observed that firms often seek to hire people who are familiar with either Spanish or Mandarin. As business and communication technology becomes globalized, rather than each culture learning multiple new languages, people come together to seemingly “agree” to learn one dominant language (ex. English). On a smaller scale, it is practical to assume that if smaller, local communities want to trade with larger neighboring powers, they need to learn the languages of the dominant culture. For example, in the case of Malta, a majority of the people communicate in Italian because of the proximity to Sicily, Italy. In addition, English is even considered an official language of the country.

A second reason that languages go extinct is that cultures of people go extinct. For example, this is occurring in the United States with Native American languages. As a result of Native American’s losing dominance over the New World, much of their language has been lost and continues to become critically endangered. The US was once considered the home base of their language, but it has dwindled in correlation with the population of Native Americans. Based on an article I found on National Geographic, Recording a Dying Language (June 2017), 130 of their languages are considered “at risk” and 74 are “critically endangered.”

The extinction of language is very significant because it carries along with it the extinction of a culture. Through language, we are able to learn more about the values, practices, and histories of the community that speaks the language. Languages reflect unique ways of perceiving the world around us and influence the way we interpret reality in the present. For example, many languages refer to colors and emotions in unique ways. The lack, or specificity, of describing these aspects could say a lot about a culture. Another prominent feature that differentiates the English language from many others is the insistent gendering of nouns and adjectives. All of these small subtleties are very important in interpreting the social/cultural nuances that differentiate cultures.

After watching the video and reading the article, I noticed that creating digital dictionaries with auditory clips for endangered languages is an extremely important method for preservation. The video notes that many nearly extinct languages exist only orally. In transcribing the language and providing it to people digitally, linguists create a permanent record and allow more people to have access to the information. I assume it is very unusual and challenging for “dead” languages to be revived, unless there is a specific reason for doing so. Although there have been instances in which a language is revived, I think the majority of languages will remain dormant if they go extinct. As discussed at the beginning of this post, globalization is an extremely prominent, inevitable force blending together cultures of people and their languages.

In relation to my study of Maltese, I think this discussion topic is extremely relevant. Although Maltese is the language that reflects the culture of Malta, English and Italian are prominently spoken throughout the country. Most notably, tourism in Malta has facilitated the use of the two alternative languages, in place of the traditional Malti. I chose to study the Maltese language, Malti, because I think it is extremely unique and reflective of Malta’s complex history and rich cultural tradition. If it were to die off, I think it would be extremely unfortunate because this language, in particular, reflects the development of a very unique society.

I have been trying to communicate with my learning in just Korean more often. 

I have been working on my Korean speaking skills. I have been practicing with my learning partner. I have also been watching Korean videos. I watch them with the subtitles at first, then I watch them without subtitles to see if I can remember what the words mean. This also helps me understand native speakers  better -- the more I listen to native speakers, the more I can understand Korean accent and it helps me with pronouncing words properly. I have also been watching videos at a reduced speed, like we talked about in class, and this has really helped because otherwise I can sometimes miss certain parts of the conversation and then I would have to start the video over. I want to continue watching videos/ listening to recordings by native speakers and get to a point where I can understand write down whatever I hear in Korean. 

I was able to interact with the staff, and order food on own at a Korean restaurant. 

Although I wasn't initially planning on learning how to write Korean, I realized that being able to read would really help me with understanding the grammar rules better. And because of the different sounds in Korean language, knowing the alphabets also helped me to understand how to use the emphasize different parts of different words. My learning partner and I went over the Korean alphabets, I practiced them on my own afterwards. Once I learned the alphabets, my learning partner showed me how the basic alphabets can be used to produce more sounds, and can actually be referred to as a separate character. For example, kk produces a completely different sound than just k. After practicing these, my learning partner made me do dictation exercises. 

The few weeks of the semester, my language partner and I focused on learning how to use single phrases in Korean. For example, I learned how to introduce myself, ask someone how they are, ask their names, where they're from, etc.. After our tutoring session, I continued to listen to Korean recoding that used the same phrases which helped me to remember them. I also started to able differentiate between phrases that can used in formal conversations and informal conversations. After I practiced the phrases on my own, I would try to use them with my language partner in our following sessions -- she worked to correct any of my mistakes and help me with my pronunciation.

Figuring Out Foreigners talks about how communication styles differ in different cultures. Some societies are more individualist and some are more collectivist, and place high emphasis on nonverbal cues and some are very literal. However no society is exclusively individualistic or collectivist; and individuals within a society fall on different parts of the spectrum. The United States is a predominantly individualist society -- emphasizing individual rights and achievements. Korean, my target culture, on the other hand, is a collectivist society. This results in Korean culture having norms and traditions that I am familiar with; and working with my language partner and watching Korean videos have helped to better understand how body language and use of different dialects in a conversation and convey different meanings within the Korean society.

Bahasa Indonesia is a member of the Austronesian language family, and is a standardization of the Malay language, which had been used in the archipelago for centuries as an inter-island trade language. The Austronesian language family is the fifth-largest language family in the world, with 386 million native speakers (4.9% of the world's population). Malaysian and Indonesian are the two widest-spoken languages in the Austronesian language family. Malay was influenced heavily by Sanskrit in ancient times, and as a result it is difficult to distinguish Sanskrit loan words as foreign by native speakers. It is so heavily influential on modern Indonesian that one could write a short story using only Sanskrit loan words. Due to its trade relationship with China going back over a millennium, Chinese loan words make up a lot of vocabulary relating to cuisine and trade. Especially since the 12th century, Arabic has influenced Malay language relating to religious vocabulary. Even the word for the Christian bible ("Alkitab", lit. "the book") is of Arabic origin. 

Since the Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Indonesia and conduct trade, many of the Portuguese loan words have to do with the items that were exposed to native Indonesians with the arrival of the Portuguese. Such examples are Meja (from mesa = table), jendela (from janela = window, and keju (from queijo = cheese). The Dutch, who colonized Indonesia for centuries, left a big impression on the Indonesian vocabulary, including words like polisi (from politie = police), kantor (from kantoor = office) and setrum (from stroom = electricity current). Through globalization, some English words have made their way, although it can be difficult to differentiate from Dutch loan words as they are both of Germanic origin. Examples include imajinasi (imagination) and universitas (university). Bahasa Indonesia uses a latin script, and used to utilize Dutch phonological spellings; these have since been replaced ("tj", pronounced "ch", became "c", and "dj", pronounced "j", became "j", etc.).

This information can be helpful because it allows one to make a guess as to how the Indonesian language may transform words from their original language in order to be incorporated as a loan word. As I know a little Portuguese from being around family who are native speakers, certain words are mutually intelligible for me. 

It seems that languages change over time mostly to incorporate new words for things that had either previously been unnamed or had not been known to exist. I recently learned from my apartment-mate that Latin as used in the Vatican church has been constantly been incorporating new words for technologies such as Television and Cars in order to keep church edicts up-to-date. As the world around us is constantly changing, language, one of the systems we rely on to make sense of it, must constantly be growing and adjusting as well.

Korean belongs to the Atlantic languages of central Asia, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, and the Tungusic languages of Siberia. However, almost half of Korean vocabularies are derived by Chinese characters, or han'gul. Korean did not have a written format until King Sejong came up with the written script of Korean. In Korean schools, students learn hanja to better understand advanced vocabulary. In order to further enhance my Korean, I need to learn some hanja to fully grasp of advanced vocabulary. This is extremely important as hanja is used very frequently. Languages change over time to become more convenient and better able to communicate feelings and to express oneself.

I forgot to do these learning posts throughout the semester, so I am going to do one each week from now until the end of the course.

 This past week I have been continuing to work on basic verb conjugations, especially in simple present tense. Atul and I also started talking about how to describe things in Hindi. So far I have learning about colors and names for rooms of the house.

Although it isn’t in my official learning plan, I think a useful language task would be to describe items, and specifically describe my house in the U.S. Atul and I were discussing how houses (and even the concepts of houses, privacy, and open space like I have in my American suburb) are so different from what an Indian might think of. Thus, being able to describe where I come from once I move to India will be a very interesting conversation starter.

I was listening to Mango lessons, but after a while I got frustrated at the slow progress and stopped. However, I know that slow progress is better than no progress, so I plan to restart that this week. It is also a little frustrating that the lessons do not match up with what I am learning otherwise, but I think at this point, the more comprehensible input I can consume, the better off I’ll be in the future.

This coming week I have the following goals:

·         memorize the colors in Hindi

·         memorize the directional prepositional words

·         complete lessons 7-10 of Mango Hindi

·         learn 10 more verbs

·         continue to practice verb conjugations in present and present continuous tenses

·         start to formulate sentences to describe my house, including describing colors and size of rooms, and placement of items in relation to other items. Ideally, I would like to be able to say something like “My bedroom is upstairs. It is big. It is yellow. My bed is behind the door. My dresser is beyond the bed. My bookshelf is above the dresser.”

This cultural post shows how I interacted with a native Hindi speaker and he helped me with some grammar. I was texting my fiancé and I send him a block of text I had written in Hindi. He responded in his own writing with corrections. I am fortunate to be able to interact with Indian culture every day because of my Indian fiancé and friends.

My writing - practicing the verb "to eat".

the corrections :)

Languages change over time, and in our increasingly global society, that change often consists of assimilating and sharing words and sometimes even grammar principles. Hindi in particular has been subject to mixing with many other languages, due to its geographic location and place in the global business and trade scene.

Hindi is an Indo-European language (as is English) and is most closely related to Sanskrit and Urdu. In fact, Urdu and Hindi have almost identical vocabularies and grammars, with the difference being in the script. Hindi uses the Devangari script while Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script. As an example, “Namaste” (hello) would be written नमस्ते in Hindi, and نمستے in Urdu. Some scholars decline to distinguish Hindi and Urdu for this reason, and in some Indian cities the two languages have merged their minor differences to become a sort of hybrid language.

Hindi also uses many, many loan words from English. Even in a lower-SES town you will find people that understand English words like numbers and basic nouns. In higher-SES Indian society, you will often hear constant code-switching as native Hindi speakers switch between Hindi and the business-language of English. Often they switch languages mid-sentence, leaving me in the lurch! This influence of English language and culture on Hindi is obviously because of the British occupancy in India until 1947.

Hindi also shares certain sounds with Arabic, which did not originally occur in Hindi. Certain letters in the Devangari alphabet were modified (by adding a dot) to be able to convey these new sounds from Arabic. For example, Hindi as an aspirated P sound, which, when written with a dot, makes the F sound to accommodate Arabic words. Hindi also has an aspirated K sound which, when written with a dot, makes the guttural KH sound that Arabic has. This hints at the cross-cultural contact between Arab-speaking countries and India, as well as between Islam and India (since Islam is almost always connected with the Arabic language, regardless of the local language).

To go off on a small tangent, one interest thing I have speculated about the connection between this common acceptability of language-switching and Indian/Hindi culture, is that the people seem to use whatever is most useful at the time to achieve a goal. In language, if an English word or phrase best conveys a concept, then that English will be used within an entire sentence of Hindi. Likewise, culturally, people tend to use items for multiple purposes and engage in more creative problem solving than I’ve seen Americans do. This may have something to do with limited resources in India and their culture of making-do with what you have. It’s very interesting to me to think that this value may bleed over into their language use as well.

I think understanding more about language change and inter-language contact is helpful to know, because it can help us create a more complex web of knowledge in our minds. For me specifically, knowing that Hindi shares some vocabulary with Arabic (kursee for chair, for example) is encouraging, as it gives me a little base of vocabulary already. Likewise, although Hindi and English seem so very different, knowing that they are both Indo-European languages makes Hindi seem just a little bit less mysterious.

Greek belongs to the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family.

There are a lot of words in Modern Greek that have been borrowed from Turkish during the Ottoman occupation in the late 1900s. These mostly include food names like 'ιμάμ μπαϊλντί', 'γιουβέτσι', 'μπριάμ', 'κεμπάμπ', and others.

Similarly, Greece has borrowed some more modern words from French, like 'κρουασάν', 'ασανσέρ', which mean croissant and elevator respectively. The latter is an interesting case because the Greek language already had a word for elevator which is still in use, but the French version is simpler and prevails in everyday speech.

Of course there are English terms for technology-related objects like 'laptop', or 'playstation'.

This interchange of labguages is very significant historically, in my opinion, as it shows the interactions of the countries throughout time. 300 years from now, perhaps people will be looking into how globalization will have affected languages around the world.

Korean has a complex vocabulary, a lot of words in Korean has Chinese or Japanese background. The Korean language might have a Chinese background because of the similarities that still in exist in certain words and the pronunciation of those words, and it also terms similar to Japanese language and Japanese culture. The true origins of the Korean language remain uncertain. There are theories that suggest Korean language may be a part of the Austronesian family, and there other theories that argue that Korean language originates from the Altaic language. And because of the similarities between modern day Japanese and Korean language, some argue that the Korean language is a part of the Japonic family. 

Although most languages evolve over time, both in sound and in writing, the changes in Korean writing were intentional. In the mid-1400s, the King made the decision to transition into the Hangul script in place of the Hanja script. The reason behind this was because Hanja used more Chinese characters that had Korean pronunciations, however these characters did not Korean script. And as a result, the general population was not very proficient in Korean because learning how to write required more effort and was a lot more difficult than learning how to simply speak Korean. The new Hangul script was made so that it had all the characters required for Korean sounds and vocabulary -- in fact, the King tried to structure the new script so that people could learn how to write Korean in just a day. Knowing this, I actually feel more confident in my learning efforts. I I have always felt more comfortable in speaking a foreign language, and have been hesitant about my writing skills. However, as I am practicing Korean, I can see how the script is a lot less complicated than other languages which helps me to remember it better.