Linguistic Minorities is one of the topics we study under the banner of "Language and Culture". It's an issue of importance in the world today, as languages are disappearing, sometimes being swallowed up by "majority languages" in ways that are cultural, political, accidental--usually a mix of all three.
Class Handouts:
Internet Resources:
- Retired Professor William Z. Shetter has some initial thoughts about the topic in his short essay, "The World Speaks English, So Are Other Languages Destined to Disappear?"
- The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) page on Linguistic Rights is a source of information about legal language rights around the world.
- What is the United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities? You can read it for yourself by clicking here.
- How would the spread of English leave students in the US and UK at a disadvantage? Find out.
- "A World Empire by Other Means," about the dominance of English, concludes that "the extinction of most languages is probably unstoppable."
- Daniel L. Everett has spent time in the Brazilian Amazon studying native languages that are gradually dying, and writes about his experiences in an essay called "From Threatened Languages to Threatened Lives".
- "Language diversity is as important as biological diversity," says this article on threatened languages.
- A quick overview of the topic of the globalization of language and the threat to linguistic minorities can be found in the article "Dying Languages" reprinted from Time magazine.
- Jack Hitt's rambling, informative essay, "Say No More," makes many excellent points about linguistic minorities and the deaths of languages, originally written for the New York Times.