Cykl artykułów został przygotowany przez Lang LTC - platynowe centrum egzaminacyjne Cambridge English, organizatora językowych wyjazdów zagranicznych oraz szkoleń językowych dla firm i klientów indywidualnych.

Our language, our identity

Nasz język, nasza tożsamość

There are around 195 countries in the world and for many the name of the country refers to the language, which is spoken there, Polish for Poland, English for England, German for Germany. Some languages are spoken by just a handful of people, others, like Chinese by over a billion. Language has always been a powerful weapon used to dominate and subjugate. A conquest was never complete until the children of the conquered had forgotten their native language and started to speak the language of the conqueror. Very often this meant the eventual demise of minor languages. There are no more conquests but there are other mechanisms, which are making the world lose languages at an unprecedented rate. Globalization has brought with it fantastic improvements to our daily lives but often at the cost of cultural and linguistic diversity. A new term had to be coined, it is linguicide, the death of languages. If we go anywhere in the world, we can still find examples of how the disappearance of a native language is having a devastating effect on identity. But fortunately, there are also a few places where minority languages persist and are fighting back.