Weare all aware of the danger that modern industry can do to the worlds ecology(生态). However, few people are awareof the impact that widely spoken languages have on other languages and ways oflife.English has spread all over the world.Chinese, Spanish, Russian, andHindi have become powerful languages as well.As these languages become morepowerful, their use as tools of business and culture increases.(47 D)When this happens, hundreds oflanguages that are spoken by only a few people die out.
Scholarsbelieve there are around 6,000 languages around the world, but more than halfof them could die out within the next 100 years.There are many examples. Arakiis a native language of the island of Vanuatu, located in the Pacific Ocean.Itis spoken by only a few adults, so like Catawba, Araki will soon disappear.Manylanguages of Ethiopian will have the same fate because each one has only a fewspeakers.Papua New Guinea is an extremely rich source of differentlanguage, but more than 100 of them are in danger of extinction(灭绝).(48 C)In the Americas, 100 languages,each of which has fewer than 300 speakers, also are dying out.
RedThunder Cloud was one of the first to recognize the threat of language deathand to try to do something about it.He was not actually born into the Catawbatribe, and the language was not his mother tongue.However, he was afrequent visitor to the Catawba reservation in South Carolina, where he learnedthe language.(49 A)The songs he sang forthe Smithsonian Institution helped to make Native American music popular.Nowhe is gone, and the language is dead.
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