By: Amarah Sumbul
Linguists are such kind of people who are fascinated by the human faculty of language.By the fact ,they can take the sounds and combine them into sound stream that express the emotions,feelings and concepts.Language is an incredible faculty that humans have which makes the difference from every other species .Language shapes the identities and around the world the creativity of the human mind has resulted in an incredible linguistic diversity.Today,in the world, 7000 languages are spoken.Half of the population on the planet speaks 50 languages and the other half of the
population speaks the other 6950 languages.
Language is changing all the time.Social environmental changings are adoptable all the time.New words,new lexical items,new phrases and
new expressions are borrowed from other languages.Language shift is another phenomenon which is reflecting the medium of language.It is the switching of one language into another language.Language shift is happening in an incredible speed. Linguists have estimated that by the end of this century half of the 7000 languages will have fallen silent.Such kind of massive extinction can be compared with the eradication of the dinosaurs.Why is this happening? We all know that our biological diversity is under the horrible threat. Globalization ,climate change and urbanization make people to give up the languages for social and economic mobility.
Linguists have been travelling the globe,searching for words and ideas
that are at the risk of being lost forever. Recently,they have interviewed to a man in Northern Australia who may be the last speaker of that language previously thought to be extinct.Half of the languages are considered to die out in the coming decades.Linguists have proved that every two weeks around the planet one language is completely disappearing for ever and ever.They are trying to bring awareness to this whole issue of language loss around the planet.Loss of the language is the loss of centuries which are worth of art, music, history, culture and science.
