Have you ever observed the variations or changes occurring in the usage of natural human languages (not the computer programming languages) spoken currently with the language spoken a decade ago or a century ago or a millennium ago. You would have at least felt the change if you have read the articles,news,books,manuscripts etc published or watched any conversation videos, documentaries, movies, audio or video recordings between different time periods.
It has not only changed in the speaking skill, but also in the other basic language skills - reading, listening and writing. There is a major impact on the vocabulary, fluency and pronunciation of any language. Spelling, grammar, style and effective communication (intrapersonal and interpersonal) of the language are other important aspects which gets affected after the basic skills.
Similar to the endangered species, even the words used in any language are also becoming endangered or even the language itself is losing its unique identity and clarity. Now a days we are speaking more with less words repeating same words again and again all the time. Once we finish our studies in school or college or any higher studies, we gradually forget the vocabulary we learnt so far and we also feel lazy to improve the vocabulary moving forward in life or career. This happens in both oral or verbal and written or non-verbal communication.
Saving one's own native language is one of the important task in the current century. As far as I have observed, the important point on improving the vocabulary is : Read, Listen, Learn and Use (verbal and non-verbal) a new word every day. As I am not here to teach how to read or speak, you will get plenty of articles, training classes, communication sessions available online itself to improve the enriched vocabulary, fluency, pronunciation and any skill essential for pointing out the importance of language.
Research shows that starting from now onward to another century, 50% to 90% of currently spoken languages would have become extinct. Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Google are the major internet resources where we can find out the history of language,dictionary of words, thesaurus, endangered languages, statistics of the current century languages etc.
Most of the linguistic scholars and researchers believe that language endangerment is an ongoing process and it cannot be stopped. May be after a millennium, human beings may start using the same language where they started the origin of the language (for example - sign forms, touch and feel forms etc as we have no direct evidence on the origin, these are just my assumptions). Those who are interested to know more on the origin of language can have it read on Wikipedia or a simple search in Google will lead to it.
Another thing I noticed is there is a lot of mixing between the natural or mother tongue languages forming a new language every minute. I will continue on the mixing of spoken and native natural languages in my next article.
--Siva
