The Death of Languages

The Death of Languages
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Although there are no accurate records that exist which can be used to estimate the number of languages that exists in the world, this due to the fact that most of the languages tend to be viewed as dialects from the same language, there is also the fact that some of the languages that are existent even today have not been documented given the nature of the locale and the minimal number of the people use them. It is estimated that there are over 6000 languages that exist the world over (National Geographic, 2013).
One of the pressures that lead to the natural death of the languages is the fact that the spekers of the winning languages gain power and influence through platforms such as the economy or technology. The languages that are not so lucky start to decline in use and eventually they are forgotten. Today English is the most dominant language the world over given the level of dominance that the USA has amassed over the last four centuries. This was the case with Latin, which today is only used in the written form in the rarest of cases. The Latin language was also popular due the fact that Roman Empire had great influence. As such it is not that these languages that are dominant have elements that depict ‘beauty’ as I known about Italian or ‘authority’ as is known of German, it is simply due the influence that the speakers have in the world.
The interaction of the dominant languages and the inferior ones has also played a role in the death of the latter. Where two or more languages interact they borrow vocabulary, as has been the case of English and some other languages such as French andItalian among others. To the inferior languages instead of adding new vocabulary, they replace the existing ones and eventually the grammar dies away. There have been incidences where disasters have dealt big blows to languages as was the case with the Trumai language, where western explorers came to the villages sick from a strain of influenza virus infecting the villagers. Less than ten of the villagers survived the infection, which meant that there were about ten speakers of the language that remained (McGuinne,2013).This is a real danger as these people are bound to interact with the popular languages forcing them to conform. In some cases though there are tribes that have maintained solitary aspects deep in the forests and have maintained their languages due to the limited interaction with the outside world. In such cases the language is bound to die with the last person that will die from the tribe.
Current trends where people go to foreign lands to study and gain experience for the job market, there is always the tendency that they will be forced to drop their language and adopt the ne...