![]() “With the loss of the languages, all kinds of wonderful things that the speakers did with their languages have also vanished, for example, some of the greatest works of oral literature ever produced - the multilingual performances with different characters speaking different languages that was found in the Pacific Northwest,” Anderson said. That’s more than all of Europe has combined, he added. Everyone should make a little extra effort to accept language varieties and accents.It’s probably impossible to measure the true magnitude of indigenous culture and Native American languages that have been lost on this continent, but many organizations have tried.įor instance, Greg Anderson, director of Living Tongues, told National Geographic in 2009 that only five language families exist in Oregon today - with most of them comprising only a handful of speakers - compared to 14 language families in Oregon 200 years ago. This is how we contribute to language loss. We know from experience that when people are excluded because of their language, they end up not wanting to use that language. ‘Most shocking is when the subtitled person comes from Suriname, a country where standard Dutch is spoken and which is a member of the Dutch Language Union. Ameka has noticed, for example, that people who do not speak standard Dutch but with a Twents regional accent instead, for example, are subtitled on television. People assume that anything that deviates from this, even if it is a different variant of Dutch, will lead to misunderstandings. This is linked to ideas about a standard form of Dutch. ‘Unfortunately, it is not perceived as polite by the target groups, who often see switching to English as a strategy to exclude them from participating in the Dutch community.’ ![]() Ameka will argue in his inaugural lecture that Dutch speakers are quick to switch because they want to be inclusive in their communication. At such times, English is seen as a common language. The tricky thing is that if you then want to practise in an informal setting, Dutch speakers often immediately switch to English.’ Dutch speakers think they are being inclusiveĪs soon as Dutch speakers encounter someone who appears to be a migrant, they assume it is better not to use Dutch. For migrants in the Netherlands, the formal systems are commendable: there are integration courses and all kinds of learning opportunities. ‘One of the ways endangered languages can stay alive is by attracting new speakers and encouraging more people to learn and use them. The Dutch Language Union foresees Dutch eventually becoming a language that is only spoken at home with the family, having lost its place in the world of work, money, science and technology.Īmeka wants to consider another area where Dutch is losing ground: the arena in which native speakers communicate with people from migrant backgrounds, like himself. As a cosmopolitan country, we are hooked on English. Perhaps not in the short term, but it is definitely losing ground. Dutch, with its 24 million speakers one of the 40 most spoken languages in the world, is also an endangered language. It’s not only smaller languages spoken by indigenous peoples that are under threat. ![]() And unfortunately, I didn’t yet have the linguistics knowledge to record this language!’ Dutch language also losing ground When those elders died, that knowledge went with them. By the time I was growing up, only a few elders remembered some of the expressions. It was used in situations where the Anfoe didn’t want outsiders to understand them. Growing up, we were told about a secret language that was part of Anfoegbe. ‘I speak Anfoegbe, a variant of Ewedomegbe Inland Ewe, a dialect of Ewegbe that is spoken in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. ‘Registers, codes and dialects die out along with them, which means our general knowledge decreases,’ Ameka explains. But if this makes humans unique as a species, why is the loss of countless languages not seen as one of the biggest problems of our times? The loss of secret languages and dialectsĪs languages are lost, much more is too. ![]() No other animal on earth uses so many variations of form and meaning in its communication as humans. ![]()
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