The Death of a Language

Within one or two generations, my native dialect of TeoChew Chinese will disappear from the face of the earth.

We'll still have DVD recordings and academic linguistics articles that will preserve the existence of the language, but I'm sure no one after the time mentioned will be taught this language from one's parents.

I only know one person on earth today who can speak this dialect before modern China's education system homogenized the whole country to Mandarin, and the Chinese diaspora from WWII forced TeoChew people to move to difference foreign cultural environments.

But even by extinction standards, something weird is going to happen.  Anyone who knows Chinese characters will know exactly what visual text it saying, and can reconstruct pronunciation with proper sources, but connotation will be lost.  It's like someone 100 years from now watching The Simpsons.

So what's the responsibility of my generation?

Do nothing.

It may sound a bit defeatist, language can't just serve the purpose of entertainment, first and foremost it has be practical. Emperor Qin Shihuang and Sugata Mitra  know that effective communication of power requires the same group to use the same terms of communication.  Let's face it, everyone who wants to profit from business at some point must know English.

Is something get lost from not knowing a language?  Sadly, subtle points of thought and wit will be erased.  But in exchange, I get to use a language that is the keystone to my ancestral language.  The corpus of knowledge gathered from the humanities is majority English.  If children 100 years from now wanted to reconstruct TeoChew, or any other dying language, they just need dictionaries, academic journals, and audio-visual material to raise language from the dead.  Researched and written academic material is the DNA of language.

But who's going to take the time and effort to learn an archaic language?  A reliable narrative of China only existed in the English language barely 50 years ago.  Yet people are now beginning to see how this narrative provides a complex view of China.

So long as a person is curious about a story, language will not die.

Random:

If you're curious about TeoChew Opera, these children are adorable.