Applied Languages

    Posted by Jaiken Struck on March 6th, 2009

Young Singaporeans are not as multilingual as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, a symposium was told on Thursday.

Dr Ng Bee Chin, Acting Head of the Nanyang Technological University’s Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, said: ‘Although we are still multilingual, 40 years ago, we were even more multilingual. Young children are not speaking some of these languages anymore. All it takes is one generation for a language to die.’

Dr Ng was speaking at the Language and Diversity Symposium, hosted by NTU’s Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, which was attended by more than 100 students, academics and international speakers.

Part of the symposium, which ends today, is an installation art exhibition titled ‘Singapore’s Voices,’ which marries linguistics, art and technology to make language a tangible item through pictures and sound. The art piece presented photographs of the speakers of languages that are slowly becoming obsolete in Singapore. When touched, the people in the photographs ‘speak’ through light sensors.

It is estimated by experts that half of the 6,000 languages that are in use worldwide today will be extinct by 2050. However, efforts can still be made to preserve existing languages, and to create new ones. Professor Li Wei from the University of London, who is an active researcher in the field of bilingualism, said: ‘One way to promote and protect linguistics is to allow contact among different cultures and people. New languages are created through such contact.’

Read more: The Straits Times

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Language and Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.