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140

The last word: why half of the world's languages could vanish this century (www.rfi.fr)

submitted 1 week ago by Pro@programming.dev to c/world@lemmy.world

70 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but that number is shrinking. Unesco estimates that half could disappear by the end of the century. So how are languages lost, and what does that mean for the people who speak them?

(page 2) 21 comments

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[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Half the world's population is going away so yeah

[–] nyamlae@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Gurl the world's population has been growing for hundreds of years and is still growing 🤦‍♂️ It is expected to peak at around 10 billion people.

The loss of human languages is a direct result of colonialism + nationalism, which go hand in hand. People that want to unite a region under one government push for only a single language to be used in that region. Italy and China are prominent examples of this. The natural linguistic diversity of the region is decimated to grow a monoculture.

Language loss is largely unrelated to people dying. Indigenous people live on, just without their languages, as they adopt the languages of their colonizers. This is very common across the world.

When a language dies in a community, the transmission of that community's culture is heavily impacted. Monolingual elders can no longer communicate (or communicate well) with younger generations, and the words in other languages do not capture the same nuances and connections as the words in their native language. The death of a language quickens the death of a culture, and that in turn quickens the death of indigenous knowledge systems.

The different languages of humanity -- our different ways of speaking, thinking, and being human -- are treasures. They show us other ways of treating each other, other ways of organizing society, other ways of experiencing beauty and fear and anger. They show us that the world is broader than our narrow lens. We can never really escape the lens of our native language and culture, but we can step out of it for a while. And in doing so, we gain a greater perspective on what it means to be human.

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[+] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz -10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

This is the second most damning evidence for catastrophic collapse of humanity, the MOST damning evidence being a lot of people are aware human languages are going extinct at an alarming rate but they don't care because their brains are so broken by tech hype fads they don't see we are truly destroying the last bits left to our humanity and home.

How is it that I can more easily convince someone to care about the diversity of the natural environment than it is to get someone to care about the diversity of human languages that represent generations of human intelligence honing thinking, communication and categorization tools in an unimaginable number of different contexts and situations'?

This is dire.

The key here is that techbro brainworms make you think communication is ALWAYS a means to an end instead of the genesis point for intelligence itself, and so techbros are always tying to skip past the artistry because they can't control that, they can't scale it up, they can't stuff it into neatly categorized boxes or structured approaches and they can't automate it, they just want the magic without allowing the conditions for magic to happen in the first place which is meeting every moment carrying the knowledge that it will be different in some new way than the last moment but being cautious not to pretend to know how.

The incomprehensible inefficiency in energy use of AI is a forced admission by people that want to play a 4x space empire game or Factorio-like factory games and dominate everything except in real life that this kind of mindset never leads to creation, only destruction... exhausting destruction that never ends. There is never a single place that kind of mindset can actually create anything, it is kind of shocking and disorienting and is the reason so many people spiral around endless denial finding solace in the fact that while this mindset is tragically and dangerously incomplete it is still very good for creating normal computer programs.

Techbros can only dissect love and shove it into woodchippers and show us the result covered in human blood while saying "Look what I made!" while they literally burn the world down, they are not only incapable of making art they are actually ideologically opposed to it at a basic level and will resort to hurting themselves to avoid accidentally making art and letting it become it's own creative idea that escapes them.

"Wait! That is mine!!!" they will say grabbing at the thing as it unfolds its wings and becomes a living work of art, and then they will go into their house and get a shotgun before it can fly up into the sky too far risen into the day to be snuffed out by a meager gunshot.

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