學士後西醫-英文題庫下載題庫

        There is a pervasive idea, in popular discourse about language endangerment, that languages just slip away, becoming obsolete or falling out of use. In this view, languages are like fashions, that pass with time, or technology, that is replaced by the more advanced. Those clinging to the old languages are seen as quaint at best, and conservative, Or even luddite, at worst. But this conception is wrong. Tt benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless, reassuring the colonizer that they are not to blame. Languages are not lost, they are taken. They are uprooted by malice or neglect, their speakers assimilated into a new tongue， or left to struggle in the space between the fading old and the out of reach new. 

       Language endangerment has continually accelerated, as the rise of nation-states and centralized, powerful governments, along with inventions such as the printing press and mass media, have created a handful of super tongues, which bulldoze all others in their path﹒While there are around seven thousand extant languages today，half the planet speaks One of just twenty-three tongues, with that proportion growing every year. At the time of writing, according to UNESCO, some twenty-four-hundred languages are vulnerable or endangered, while almost six hundred are on the verge of going extinct.

       As a Welsh saying goes, “cened| heb iaith, cened! heb gallon,” a nation without a language is a nation without a heart. Languages are deeply enmeshed with culture; they link people to their ancestors and help maintain traditions, oral histories and ways of thinking about the world. The loss of linguistic diversity is not merely an intellectual tragedy, but a continued consequence of colonialism and imperialism, as groups are forcibly assimilated and their diverse histories, cultures and tongues wiped out. This can literally be a matter of life and death: researchers in Australia and Canada have shown that indigenous communities that retain access to their languages are healthier and more cohesive, with less unemployment, alcoholism and suicide, and higher levels of education, than those unmoored from traditional culture and forced to use English alone. Language diversity can also foster new ideas and thinking that can help us address many of the injustices and disasters wrought by colonialism and industrialization. Environmentally, economically, and culturally， language diversity holds the potential for new solutions for the problems often wrought by the world’s linguistic monoliths. The United Nations, in declaring 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages, recognized that such tongues provide “resources for good governance, peacebuilding, reconciliation, and sustainable development".