Course Title
Instructors’ Name
Student Name:
Student ID:
The Dying of Languages under Urbanization
As the world is increasingly globalized and homogenized, many of those languages spoken by people will likely disappear. Many small communities are gradually abandoning their native tongues in favor of dominant languages such as English, Spanish or Mandarin. According to the research, there are about 7,000 languages in the world. However, 80 percent of the world population speaks only 83 of the 7000 different languages (Harrison 14). Those languages which are at risk of losing all of its speakers in a few generations is consider as endangered languages (Krauss 6). By studying three cases of dying language, this paper is trying to argue that the urbanization and homogenizing of mainstream value, as well as the forced abandonment of native language by the dominators have deteriorated the phenomenon of language dying.
For many people, there are obvious advantages to learn the mainstream languages and pass it to their next generation. With the background of globalization and urbanization, acquiring fluency in dominant languages can help those from small communities find jobs easily and live successfully as those mainstream languages are primary languages used for living, commerce and education.
In the research paper about endangered languages in the Philippines, Headland has studies the situation about engendered Negrito languages. A forth of languages used in the Philippines today are spoken by Negrito population. The Negrito population used to take 10 percent of the Philippine population during the early Spanish time and they spoke about 32 different Austronesian languages. However, they comprise only 0.05% population of current Philippine population nowadays (Headland 1). Headland discusses one particular Negrito language, the Casiguran Agta, which could be understood as the dialect of one Negrito tribe, in the research paper. The Casiguran Agta people...