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Course: 7th grade reading & vocabulary > Unit 3
Lesson 1: Building knowledgeWelcome to the Living Tongues unit!
Languages change a lot over time and are influenced by culture, historical events, technological advances, and more. These factors also cause new languages to evolve, and, sometimes, cause existing languages to become extinct. Today, linguists are working to preserve some languages that are in danger of disappearing; although not everyone agrees that this is worth the effort.
In this unit, you will:
- Learn about endangered languages, and languages that have a relatively small number of speakers worldwide
- Consider the role languages play in society
- Think about why people are making efforts to preserve languages
By:
- Watching videos that explain different approaches and strategies for reading
- Reading and answering questions about literary and informational texts
- Learning new academic words
In order to answer the essential question: What is the value of preserving languages?
Want to join the conversation?
- Upvote if you love food!🍕🍔🍟🌭🍗(120 votes)
- How many languages are extinct?(23 votes)
- I don't know but probably if a group of those people die or books or things with writing on them lost, probably leads to extinction(4 votes)
- If a language is becoming extinct because no one is using it, why do people even try to preserve the language? They can just archive it and move on, am I right?(0 votes)
- That's essentially saying the same thing as "The pandas are endangered. Eh, why try to save them, we've got grizzlies instead."
Language preservation is hugely important because languages contain a unique aspect of a culture within them. Lose the language, and you lose some of the cultural and linguistic diversity that give us the perspectives that improve our understanding. Languages give us insight into various cultures and how they function, and when you lose the language, you lose things like information given by oral tradition, as well as the culture's way of expressing itself. Losing a language is akin to losing a species.(35 votes)
- can a new language be created today?(5 votes)
- When was the concept of language created and why? If you think about it language is a form that is still gaining more and more from the years so who was the real mastermind in starting such a diabolical Idea?(4 votes)
- if you look at it that way, then why walk? you still learn new ways to walk a lot, so why bother? also, it was invented in the hunter-gather era, as rhythmic chanting, for stuff like firing bows, hitting rocks, and also to tell each other where some good food was.(3 votes)
- The value of preserving languages is to make it easier to understand other people around the world and know their languages.(4 votes)
- not everybody agrees its worth saving but... it would not even be that much work if we just, archived it right? or am i wrong?(4 votes)
- why is it like that(3 votes)
- the last unit was so hard!!(3 votes)
- what comes after abc123(2 votes)
- The power of 123 Trelegy!(2 votes)