The Value of Indigenous Languages

  Indigenous languages throughout the globe are disappearing due to their lack of practice with the younger generations. With some of the top languages in the world being Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi and Arabic, younger generations are more attracted to these languages, which, rather than their less commonly used indigenous languages of their local communities, allow these people to be able to get, and keep, stable jobs in the cities near them. In 'Speaking in Tongues' by James Geary, he states that linguists have determined that a language dies every two weeks at least. And it is due to their lack of ‘use’ in the business and economic world that they are losing their hold in their communities. But, these languages have much more importance than what meets the eye. These languages are the backbone of worldwide cultures and, as said by Geary, “the death of a language such as Tlingit means more than simply the loss of another obscure, incomprehensible tongue. It marks the loss of an entire culture.” These languages include these cultures’ beliefs through the words that they use and, according to botanists, they found that certain words or phrases in indigenous languages described certain plants almost identically to the plants these botanists found and studied that they named differently. Through this, these botanists were able to conclude that indigenous languages not only make up a culture’s beliefs, values and traditions, but it can also have the potential to show the migration patterns of an entire culture. This alone could show how integrated certain cultures truly are and allows us to hypothesize what the world could’ve looked like in the times of old for the ancestors of certain cultures to have been able to travel by foot or caravan across the world to, now seemingly impossible-to-reach, destinations. As Aryon Dall’Igna Rodrigues said, “The world is a mosaic of visions [and] with each language that disappears, a piece of that mosaic is lost.” This can relate to our world’s history as, without these languages, we are not able to fully piece together the history of our world from how our current cultures, languages, ideas and knowledge exists to how our countries and current cultures have come to existence. It is because of this that I find that indigenous languages are important to preserve as they carry a culture, beliefs and carry a history of a great many people.