| Description |
Language is the most crucial element of culture. It is the most distinctive accomplishment of humans, marking them off from other animal species. But, being made literally of mere thin air, language is also the most intangible among man’s cultural acquisitions. It has taken humans about half a million years to develop this unique skill that has so profoundly determined how human societies are formed and how they carry out communication among themselves as well as how they hand down the collective knowledge from one generation to another. This greatest cultural acquisition of man has come under an unprecedented stress in our time. It is estimated that out of the approximately 6,000 living languages, a majority shall disappear in near future. UNESCO has already started bringing out inventories of ‘world languages in danger.’ |
