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Negative Effect of Ignoring Minority Language Loss
Language is a symbol of a state or nation and a representation of ethnic identity for the majority and minority communities. It provides autonomy for people who are enjoying it. Therefore, both societies have great desires to keep their languages alive and transfer them to new generations. However, minority languages have always had too little chance to survive compared to the high prestige of majority languages. Owing to reasons ranging from nationalist language policies, linguistic to social reasons, many could not survive. In linguistics, language’s death occurs when a language loses its last inborn speaker, while language disappearance occurs when it is no longer identified. Therefore, loss of language is referred to as the suppression of the mother tongue or indigenous language. The language loss results in the loss of human factors, embodied by the language, relevant for self-representation, self-expression, self-definition, and economic and socio-cultural growth. There is a need for language learning because it helps in; growth of the brain, better memory, better-listening skills, higher verbal and non-verbal intelligence, improvement of attention span, better at multitasking; one will be more creative. Lastly, one will be able to slow down cognitive decline. Therefore, this paper seeks to discuss two negative effects of ignoring minority language loss, which includes loss of community cultural traditions, undermining people’s logic of belonging and identity, which always evacuates the whole community, and linguistic factors which cause minority language to die.
First, the loss of community cultural traditions occurs when a community ignores their minority language. These cultural traditions are always tied to that language. For example, poetry, myths, and songs cannot be easily transferred or translated to another language, and if they do, they lose their original meaning and original purpose. This always affects their sense of identity, which later produces a weak social cohesion as the new ones replace their traditions and values. This is always considered anomie. Loss of minority language also has political significance as some nations deliberate diverse privileges or statuses of politics on smaller ethnic groups, which have their ethnicity defined in terms of language. This means that when a community ignores its minority language loss, they will also their legitimacy of politics as a community that possesses special collective rights, thus loss of community cultural traditions.
Secondly, there are different linguistic factors which cause minority languages to die. First of all, minority language acquisition has an enormously decisive role in the continuance of language. Language acquisition is a process; children are exposed to “input” in the first days, and then they attempt to produce similar sounds uttered by their parents. When they make a mistake, they are corrected by parents until they imitate almost all sounds correctly in the following stages. If this process is ceased or interrupted, mother tongue transmission will not be completed successfully. In this case, internal and external factors such as family and environment bring about different conditions in minority languages.
In conclusion, as communities lose their language, they often lose parts of their cultural traditions tied to that language, such as songs, myths, and poetry that are not easily transferred to another language. This may, in turn, affect their sense of identity, producing a weakened social cohesion as their values and traditions are replaced with new ones. This is sometimes characterized as anomie. Losing a language may also have political consequences as some countries confer different political statuses or privileges on minority ethnic groups, often defining ethnicity in terms of language. That means that communities that lose their language may also lose political legitimacy as a community with special collective rights. During language loss, sometimes referred to as obsolescence in the linguistic literature, the language that is being lost generally changes as speakers make their language more similar to the language that they are shifting to. For example, gradually losing grammatical or phonological complexities that are not found in the dominant language.