The endangered languages that are fighting back - BBC

it's estimated that in a century at least 50 of the languages spoken today won't be around anymore but some languages are fighting back yeah half of the world speaks just 20 languages so you have a very small number of languages spoken by an enormous amount of people that means the other half of the world speaks the other five seven thousand languages and many of those languages in turn are endangered an endangered language is a language that is at risk of Disappearing there's a number of reasons this could be things like power and domination political repression War genocide economic pressures there are a lot of potential threats IMA in hero pink cans Avail prosarians address [Music] assist their share to soccer and we feel mention hind reading is [Music] language loss is so much more than just words because language is the way that we communicate our thoughts our knowledge our experiences and this is why there are so many efforts around the world at language Revival and revitalization foreign [Music] have Master Apprentice programs where you'll pair one fluent speaker elderly speaker of the language with a younger person maybe in their teens not only are the children having a chance to acquire the language they're also having a chance to interact with the grandparent generation who are the culture bearers my name is a famous success story is Hebrew it wasn't spoken for around 2000 years it was used in religious texts then it was Elizabeth Yehuda who moved to Palestine late 19th century spoke Hebrew in the home raised his son speaking Hebrew as a first language which then created the first Native Hebrew speaker in almost 2000 years and now it's a national language spoken by millions the same is true for language like Welsh so with the Welsh case what we have is a smaller language which has received quite a lot of State support eventually after having come under a lot of pressure to switch to English there's people who who might have grandparents or great-grandparents that still recall things like the Welsh not whereby if you're in school you would be given this token if you spoke Welsh because you needed to speak English in school now we have Welsh medium education we have children who are growing up speaking Welsh and educated all through school and through University in the language address now it's possible for communities themselves to create their own resources like dictionaries curricula or even language learning textbooks all online these are not confined to a library somewhere but they're accessible to members of the whole Community you can be on the other side of the world and learning Hawaiian or you could be in Hawaii and learning Maori grasa Twitter Tick Tock a Discord a dessert program Blue Moon if you speak just one language you're in the minority throughout history and across the world being multilingual is far more common and that means that when you learn another language you're connecting yourself to that diversity of Human Experience when it's all there at your fingertips foreign

Channel: BBC

Views: 16,857

Keywords: BBC iPlayer, United Kingdom, British TV, British TV Shows, Watch UK TV Online, Watch British TV Online, Watch British TV Shows Online

Id: wxLRi2GpBQc

Length: 5min 41sec (341 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023