Title: Disappearing Languages
Purpose: To inform the audience of globalization’s effects on languages and their disappearance.
Thesis: The effect of globalization on minor world languages is causing them to rapidly disappear.

Gain Attention: Before I begin my topic this morning, I would like to introduce you to a very special woman by the name of Marie Smith. (Show transparency of Marie.) Marie is an eighty-year old native Eskimo woman from Alaska who also happens to be the last remaining native speaker of an Eskimo language called Eyak. (Write Eyak on the board.) Most of us in high school took a foreign language in French, German, Japanese or Spanish. These are what are known as major world languages. There’s a degree of social and economic value in learning them. However, there are hundreds of minor world languages which, like Eyak, are in danger of becoming extinct. In fact, an article by Rosemarie Ostler in the Futurist magazine states that over 50% of languages today could be extinct by the year 2100 and that only 5-10% of languages are actually "safe".

Credibility: I became interested in this topic because I’m majoring in foreign languages and because I visited Alaska last summer and got interested in the Eskimo culture. I wondered why aren’t the children born to native speakers of minority languages simply not learning both of them—the minority language and the predominate one? I did some research to find out.

Overview: So today I’ll tell you first, how a language dies; second, what the implications are to a culture whose language just disappears; and third, what can be done to stop it.

I.    There are several major reasons a language disappears.

A.    First, governments ban the use of a language or simply kill those who speak it. Let me give you three examples:

1. According to Discover Kilkenny published in 2000, in 1366 during King Edward III rule in England and the British domination of Ireland there was a ban on anything Irish—no intermarriages between the English and the Gaelic Irish, no use of the Irish language, no Irish celebrations.
   
2. Here in the U. S. several centuries passed during which arriving settlers believed the only way to "civilize" the native "barbarians" was to force their children into English-only boarding schools where use of their native languages was punished by physical abuse and humiliation. As a result 149 out of 187 Native American languages are almost extinct.
   
3.  More recently the Kosovars still fight to speak their native Albanian tongue despite Serbian policies to prohibit it.

B.    A second reason languages disappear is that political unification and population pressures force people to learn a majority language.

1. Intercultural marriages, international trade and commerce, education abroad, and greater mobility and communication channels means that people are exposed to and learn majority languages, often times out of necessity.
   
2.  Members of small communities must decide whether to speak their native tongue or do business in the larger world. East Africans must learn Swahili, central Europeans must speak Russian, and it seems as though everyone needs to learn English.
   
3. The media news is often presented in the language understood by the most people.
   
4. Whether due to governments forcing people to learn a majority language, the seduction of participating in global commerce and amassing the wealth that comes from it, or simply needing to learn the language to understand and remain current in world events, these all slowly eat away at each new generation to cause the eventual extinction of the native language.
   
5. The end result is a generation of children who speak both their native tongue and the majority language. The older generation of native speakers dies and the younger generation’s children become monolingual in the majority language.

Transition: I’ve talked about the reasons languages disappear; now I’ll turn to the consequences of languages disappearing.

II.    The loss of language results in loss of knowledge and history.

A.    Survival of people depends on knowledge passed through language.

1.    According to Nicholas Ostler in the Futurist 1999, "When language transmission itself breaks down,  there is always a larger loss of inherited knowledge."

2.    One example would be the survival skills of small tribes of people inhabiting very hot or cold climates.

3.    Another example is the medicinal cures and treatments know only to aboriginal or native tribes that originate from natural sources.

4.    Cultural legacies of folklore, dance, music, history, and knowledge are all lost when the last speakers of  these languages die.

CONCLUSION

Summary: There are many ways to kill a language. Languages do die out naturally sometimes, however it’s usually due to tyranny, ignorance, or laziness as I’ve discussed in my speech. Once a language dies, it isn’t just the words that are gone forever, it’s an entire history of people who have given just as much to our planet as the speakers of English, Spanish, French or Russian.

Memorable Ending: Here’s the picture of Marie Smith that I showed you at the beginning of my speech. And here’s a balloon. Imagine for a moment that all of Marie’s cultural history is contained inside this balloon, all the richness of her Eskimo heritage, the folklore, the traditions, the story telling but then suddenly it disappears (pop balloon). This is what has happened and continues to happen to many minor languages of the world.

Bradley, John. Discover Kilkenny, O’Brien Press, Dublin, Ireland, 2000.
Diamond, Jared. "Speaking with a Single Tongue," Discover, pp 78-85, February 1993.
Ostler, Rosemarie. "Disappearing Languages", The Futurist, pp 16-22, August-September 1999.