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Endangered Languages (from Emile KAHOUN, Lycée Yadéga This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Languages have come and gone since the early day of human history, but the wave of destruction today is unprecedented. It's happening wherever technologically advanced societies overwhelm less powerful groups. Australian colonizers helped wipe out more than 150 native languages over the past 222 years, and more than 100 others are on the brink. In South America, Spanish and Portuguese have overwhelmed scores of native Indian languages, and pioneers pursuing "manifest destiny" helped to destroy most of some 300 languages native to North America. Of 100 languages that once were spoken in what is now California, only half remain, and most of those are spoken only by a few tribal elders.
Globalisation is probably helping to fuel the destruction. English, in particular, is quickly becoming the indispensable language of successful people from different countries and cultures. That's partly because a disproportionate number of the world's rich speak English, and also because English is the language of the technological revolution. Even before the internet, television telephones, air travail and other innovations helped the languages of dominant cultures and economies to spread. The French are indignant about what one academic calls "an insidious dispossession" by English, but speakers of the regional Breton language in northwest France are equally ruffled by the dominance of French. Breton speakers number 268,000 down from a million a century ago.
The obliteration of small languages might seem inevitable and irreversible. But languages, unlike people, can be resurrected. The fluent speaker of Miami Indian died in the 1960s, but Daryl Baldwin, 37, has nursed Miami back to life. As a student at the University of Montana a decade ago, Baldwin immersed himself in research on his ancestral tongue-studying texts by missionaries and others recorded as far back as the 1600s. With the help of a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, he taught himself Miami vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, and then he brought the language into his home.
Now Baldwin, his wife and their four kids have a rule: Whenever possible, they speak only Miami among themselves. About 80 percent of 3 year-old Emma's vocabulary is Indian.
…Baldwin doesn't want his kids to learn Miami at the expense of English, however "a language is what makes you part a country" he says. "But there's a notion in America that you have to give up one language to get the other… "It would be wrong to say no English at all [in Africa], no French, "says Ngugi Wa Thiongo, a Kenyan author who writes his novels, plays and essays in his native Gikuyu." The issue is the relationship between languages. Now, the marginalized languages are being forced to die. If present trends continue, Africa as a cultural identity will eventually cease to exist".

By Jeffrey Bartholet, Newsweek June 19,2000 page 63

QUESTIONS

A) Guided commentary ( 14 points )

1) What, according to the text, are the main causses of the death of hundreds of languages all over the world ? (2 pts )
2) What is the difference between people and languages ? Pick up an example from the text to justify your answer.(4pts)
3) Why does Baldwin refuse his children to stop learming English ? (3 points )
4) What should we do if we do not want "Africa to cease to exist as a cultural identity "? (5 pts )

B) Translate the second paragraph into French : from "Globalization is probalbly..... to ... a million a centry ago."