Today, Sunday February 22, is World Mother Language Day. There are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world. 230 are in Europe, including 75 for France. English is spoken by over 1 billion people around the world, or 1 in 7 people.
For the record, the 4 million inhabitants of Papua New Guinea alone use 840 languages! In France, in the name of heritage, students can now choose a regional language as a living language, such as Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Basque, or even the Melanesian languages.
The origin of languages was made according to mixtures of cultures and migrations. A majority of linguists doubt that one language is at the origin of all the others, but the fact remains that there are large families such as the Indo-European languages, from which Celtic or Romance languages originate. like French.
According to UNESCO, almost one in two languages will have disappeared before the end of this century, and these are history books that are disappearing forever.
Churchill said that a people who forget their past have no future. In the future, everyone may be able to express themselves in their mother tongue, and be understood by all, thanks to artificial intelligence applied to instant translators, which could also transcribe emotions … Languages, just like species , evolve in new modes of communication, such as emojis, used with the generalization of smartphones.
Chloé Léonardon, doctoral linguist at the University of Paris Nanterre, explains that: “To speaking, we have a lot of non-verbal linguistic elements that we cannot have in writing, that is to say gestures, micro-expressions of the face, the tone of the voice that changes. We will therefore have to compensate for this lack of information and emoticons are one of them. “
In the 19th century, Esperanto, introduced as a vehicular language, could have made it possible to maintain neutrality. Some learned societies, such as the Aéroclub de France, which brought together French, Russians, Americans and Germans, had adopted it at the time. But it did not last. Today, only 2 million people practice it in the world.
International Mother Language Day
Languages and evolution: new hypotheses
How many languages are spoken in the world?
Languages threatened with extinction
Are emojis a language in its own right?
A genealogical tree of Indo-European languages
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