Second Class, 19th of February.

Today, we had our first English class after a week of Chinese New Year holiday, with our lovely lecturer, Miss Nilam. Today's class was a little bit different and is more interesting compared to the previous class. The title for today's class is Language. Miss Nilam taught us a couple of new things that we never knew before. Example, the total number of recognized language in the world. The total recognized language in the world is around 7,000 different type of languages.  All of us did not expect such many languages in the world, some are even not found or recognized yet. 

So today we were also told to write about language death. We actually do not know the real meaning of language death. But after doing some research, we figured it out. Language death means an extinction of a language, explained by linguistics. If a language is rarely spoken or used, it will slowly be forgotten and disappears. Those are called language death. 

So, what is the reason that will cause language death? Nowadays, many of us uses English to communicate with each other, also use in education. It has became an international language. Due to this situation, many parents now set English as a first language for their children right from the moment they are born and learns how to talk. They neglected their mother language thereby losing their identity. Some even warn their parents not to speak other languages to their children besides English. Every parents do want the best for their child, of course they would like them to speak fluent English when they grow up and have confidence when they are communicating in English with others, but this is the wrong way of educating them. These are the reasons that causes language death. The child will grow up not knowing what is his/her heritage language for his/her race. 

We can't let this go on and we have solutions to this. There are many ways of preserving a language. Firstly, be proud of your mother tongue. Shouldn't be shy while communicating with it and build up the confident in your own language. Besides that, government should make it a must to study the language of the country or race. Like how our country Malaysia is doing. For all Malaysian, no matter your race, is a must to learn Bahasa Melayu from primary school all the way to university. This will assure that we will be able to write, speak, understand and listen to our official language of the country. This will definitely avoid language death.  

Finally, should we encourage saving all languages or should we be selective? From my opinion, we should save all the languages around the world. Because, it is actually giving a chance to our new generation or someone who are interested in learning a different language. All the languages around the world are wonderful, we should spread it to our next generation and keep it going. 

Thanks for reading.

Reference from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death