The Big Picture

It is generally agreed that there are about 6000 to 6500 languages spoken across the world today and half of them are under the threat of extinction. The main reason behind this is that speakers of the most of the indigenous tribal languages are switching over to the major languages and also because the speakers are not passing their heritage tongue to their children. This has resulted in the continuous decrease in the number of speakers of these languages. Eventually every year a good number of these languages die silently. With the ever increasing influence of globalisation, such languages are disappearing at a much accelerated pace, making the human kind poorer than ever before in terms of linguistic cultural and social diversity.
Therefore it is much important that steps should be taken at all levels to minimize this global erosion of linguistic, traditional and cultural knowledge from the world. Its a challenge but lets take it up.