The article is
titled, "Executive Director's Message: Our Languages on the Air: A Sense
of Home, Place, and Belonging." The article revolves around the issue of languages,
and therefore culture, going extinct. To get a grasp of the situation, 6,912
languages exist in the world, but as of 2009, 2,500 languages are
endangered and 200 are completely lost. They state that one of the main
issues that is causing so many languages to disappear is none other than
technology. But technology is also how they are solving this problem of
preserving languages and cultures. Other issues for the loss of language include
language repression, assimilation, and the younger generation's replacement lingo.
I too am a part of this movement. I am a Korean-American. In American society,
I can see the digital language merging into daily conversations, such as LOL,
BRB, photobomb. Words that have been popularized by media are being added to
the dictionary as a permanent place in our language history, such as deets
(detail), tweet (Twitter status), and crowdfunding (a new phenomenon in
raising capital through the public). I feel like language is an ever-changing
subject. I can name numerous words (or lingo) that have specific origins and
signify specific time periods. The digital age is just what's happening now.
But I also agree that technology can as easily be the best method of preserving
languages. Language carries culture and there’s no better example than Chinese
characters that span across most, if not, all of the Asian languages. Chinese
characters are interesting because with just one character you can tell a
cultural story of how that symbol came to be. They are a deeper version of
prefixes and suffixes, since they not only have a meaning, but also a story. So
I completely understand the need to preserve language, because its more than
just communication, but a record of our history and culture.
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