Social Linguistics essays

Social Linguistics essays Linguistics is a major part of the anthropology field. Today, one of the largest obstacles in anthropology, is language groups becoming endangered. During the last couple years they have become more concerned about groups that are switching from the original language to a different one that has more power and opportunities. The other reason why linguists have become concerned is the groups are becoming so small that there is very little chance of continuing use of the groups language. The problem now is the extinction of languages, the loss of cultures, and the people they symbolize. There are different ways of explaining endangered languages, the easiest definition would be, languages below some critical number of speakers. (Kindell 1) Less spoken languages are in more danger, but the complex social, economic, political, or religious are major factors for the teaching of an original language from parents to their children. Nancy Dorian from the International Journal of the Sociology of Language describes three symptoms of language death, she says they are due to fewer speakers, fewer domains of use, and structural simplification. As of right now there a few options we can do to be involved with endangered languages. One, do absolutely nothing; deal with the changes in language use as normal. A second option is to attempt some sort of language maintenance program. Such as, language development plans, including education, literature production, and translation. There are certain problems for such a plan. A couple questions would be; should we even try to save languages from extinction? Is it even worth trying and can we really make a difference? Third, in the case of a moribund language (languages no longer being learned as mother-tongue by children), document the language and recording the most data as possible. In Sarah Gudschinsky's work, with the last known speaker of Ofaie, gave valuable information...