Language Death: Part Three

PROBLEMS OF LANGUAGE REVIVAL

Reviving a language can be hard. Over the years, the language restoration mission has been carried out diligently. Various methods are used to restore a language successfully. With every success, comes the downfall of language revival. These are some of the problems that are faced by linguists:

• Complex Grammar of the language

This is a common problem that arises in the process of revival of a language. Understanding the grammar and sentence structure is extremely hard as such factors differ from culture to culture. It reduces the possibility of language transmission. E.g., the Irish language has a rigid rule of grammar adding to the complex structure.

• Availability of other languages

The more dominant languages are most likely to be learned more often than the languages from the minorities. This brings less light on the depletion of the minority languages. E.g., the Māori language is successfully revived because of the less availability of other languages that need to be revitalized.

• Support from the government

Language revival programs are likely to be more successful with the help of the government. Schools, media, and offices can use the minority language to bring more recognition to it (Spolsky, 1995).

As Noam Chomsky says,” A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.” Language plays a pivotal role in a culture. It defines and enhances the aesthetic of a culture. Language and culture are inseparable instead they are interrelated. It is true that a lot of languages are extinct and have lost their cultural practices. Their extinction has drawn attention to the need for the restoration of such languages. Lost languages can be brought back with effective methods like the bilingualism method, total-immersion method, and language reclamation. This paper has aimed to shed light on the dying languages that are suffering at the factors like no longer being speakers of the endangered language, the older generation being the sole speakers of the language, and so on. This paper has discussed why and what makes language has its death, language death from the perspective of the old and modern terms, the vitality and the need to be worried about dying languages and the methods ad problems followed shortly giving insight on the alarming decline in languages.