‘The patterns and connections we make among various concepts may be structured by the linguistic habits of our community.’ ‘Your brain and mine are different from the brain of someone, who speaks French, for instance’ Pagel says, and this could affect our thoughts and perceptions. There is mounting evidence that learning a language produces physiological changes in brain. ‘Moreover, the loss of diversity may also deprive us of different ways of looking at the world’, says Pagel. ‘If a person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something' Mufwene says. Language is also intimately bond up with culture, so it may be difficult to reserve one without the other. When an unwritten and unrecorded language disappears, it is lost to science. But are languages worth saving? At the very least, there is a loss of data for the study of languages and their evolution, which relies on comparisons between languages, both living and dead. ‘They can not refuse to speak English if most commercial activity is in English". ‘Native Americans have not lost pride in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-economic pressures’ he says. But Salikoko Mufwene, who chairs the Linguistics Department at the University of Chicago, argues that the deadliest weapon is not government policy but economic globalisation. The former US policy of running Indian reservation in English, for example, effectively put languages such as Navajo on the danger list. Quite often, governments try to kill off a minority language by banning its use in public or discouraging its use in school, all to promote national unity. ‘When the next generation reaches their teens, they might not want to be induced into the old tradition.’ ‘People lose faith in their culture’ he says. Why do people reject the language of their parent? It begins with a crisis of confidence when a small community finds itself alongside a larger, wealthier society, says Nicholas Ostler of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath. The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director o the Alaska Native Language Center, in Fairbanks.
If it is spoken by children it is relatively safe. What makes a language endangered is not that the number of speakers, but how old they are. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000 speakers. It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear. Only 250 languages have more than a million speaker, and at least 3,000 have fewer than 2,500. Isolation breeds linguistic diversity as a result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people. “It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the loss is difficult to know.’ “At the moment, we are heading for about three or four languages dominating the world”, says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. Never before has the planet’s linguistic diversity shrunk at such a pace. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within two generations - that’s one language lost every ten days. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time. Street sign, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are all in English.
Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in English.
Most of its speakers are middle-age or elderly. In the Native American Navajo nation which sprawls across four states in the American south-west, the native language is dying. Many minority languages are on the danger list. You should spend about 20 minutes on Question 1-13 which are based on the Reading Passage below. IELTS Academic Reading Passage - Lost for Words