John Mcwhorter Cosmopolitan Tongue

Improved Essays
Languages of the world What if the entire world spoke one language? What would that language be? In John McWhorters writing the Cosmopolitan Tongue he talks about how languages are dying and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. He claims that by 2109 ninety percent of the world’s languages will be dead. That would take us from the current 6000 languages down 600 languages for the entire world to use. Do you think that is a bad thing? Mcwhorter doesn’t, he feels that it is a natural progression caused by people of smaller communities moving to bigger cities and taking on the language of that city. I disagree with McWhorter about it being a natural progression brought on by people leaving their communities. If that is what killed languages, …show more content…
Sometimes this even happens without the majority of the people realizing what is going on. This is a tricky way to get indigenous people to conform to a new language, but can it really kill languages off? Yes it can kill languages, but I think no matter what approach is taken it would be very hard to kill off 90% of the world's languages and I don’t feel that we should allow that many languages to die. I don’t think that we need 6000 languages in the world, but I also think it would be bad if we let that number dwindle to 600. I think it would be nearly impossible to save all the languages in the world, especially the unwritten languages, but we should try to keep as many as we can. Different languages show us the diversity in the people and cultures of the world and I think all generations should have the right to explore and experience those diversities. I do believe the cultural diversity can live on without their own language, but they shouldn’t have to. Languages give to their cultures and we should not go into areas and try to force people to give up their language or their culture. If people move into new areas or countries they should be open to picking up on that areas languages and cultures. We should all accept people's language and cultural choices and respect

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