Essay, Paragraph or Speech on “Languages – Their Diversity and Future” Complete Essay, Speech for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Languages – Their Diversity and Future

Linguists estimate that about 5,000-7000 different languages are spoken in the world today. The imprecision in this estimate is due to some dialects being in the process of diverging and it is not clear that they have reached the stage of being separate languages. If two people find each other’s speech unintelligible, they are usually thought to be speaking different languages rather than dialects.

About 200 languages have a million or more native Speakers. The most widely spoken 15 languages in the world include French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Wu Chinese, Yu Chinese, Russian, Tamil and Bengali; besides Mandarin Chinese which is the most common, spoken by around 874 million people as a native language in 16 countries. Hindi comes a close second with approx 366 million in 17 countries and English a distant third with approximately 341 million in 104 countries.

Geographically, English finds a larger distribution as compared to all other spoken languages. It is an official language in 52 countries. A total of 1/4 to 1/3 of the people in the world understand and speak English. It has become be most useful language to learn for international travel, is the de facto language of diplomacy, and the predominant language in electronic communication.

Some parts of the world have unusually high concentrations of different languages. There are around 900 native languages spoken by the 5-10 million people of New Guinea and its neighboring islands; that is roughly 1/6 of all languages being spoken by far less than 1% of he world’s people!

There are no ‘primitive’ languages. All languages lave a system of sounds, words, and sentences that can adequately communicate the content of culture. However, cultures that have more complex, diverse economies and advanced technologies have larger vocabularies. For instance, English has roughly 615,000 non-technical words and is growing at a rate of hundred to thousand every English has so many more non-technical words because it has acquired words from more than 240 other languages.

Languages change at different rates at different time’s response to new social, cultural, and environmental nations. Some nations strongly resist the acquisition new words from other languages. This has been the with the French government’s response to the relentless invasion of English words in recent decades, especially in pop culture and technology. However, young people eagerly embrace new words without caring for “language purity”.

The majority of the languages in the world are unwritten with no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, and many of them are disappearing; it is estimated that one language dies out every two weeks. Experts say they are struggling to save at least some of them. That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost. This is the first step in the extinction of a language. When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday.”

Languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The parents would be the first to do this, feeling that the other more widely spoken languages would be more useful for their child. Another common reason is to find the language of a more developed nation or society as more ‘advanced’, `respectable’ and definitely more ‘fashionable’ . 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world’s population while 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world’s people. The key to getting a language revitalized is getting a new generation of speakers and by recording the endangered language. Languages today are just as, if not more endangered than plant and animal species and it is up to us to save them.