When languages die, ecosystems often die with them | Public Radio International
▻http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-07-15/when-languages-die-ecosystems-often-die-them
The study, from the World Wildlife Fund, measured the threat to languages using a scale that tracks how threatened species are. Not only are many languages steadily losing speakers, says co-author Jonathan Loh, but "the rate of decline, globally, is actually very close to the rate of decline in populations of wild vertebrate species. [...]
And that’s no coincidence. Loh explains that languages have a lot of specific local knowledge built in. “The cultures have evolved in a particular environmental context, so they have an extraordinary amount of traditional ecological knowledge — knowledge of the local species, plants, animals, the medicinal uses of them, the migration patterns of animals behavior,” he says.
So when the languages die off, much of that knowledge goes with them. “Then children stop learning the language, they also stop acquiring that traditional knowledge,” Loh says.
#écologie #écosystèmes #culture #langues #langage #peuples_tribaux
