Sociologists claim that language and culture are slowly disappearing among nations today. What do you think are the reasons for the loss of languages and cultures?

One of the most potent ways of understanding the culture and history of a country or region is through its language. Unfortunately, many cultures and languages are now under threat of being extinct recently. This essay will discuss several contributors to such social phenomenon. One of the reasons why languages are dying out is migration. Specifically, if the native speakers move into another country where the government promotes using a particular language, the mother tongue will be irrelevant and abandoned. Accordingly, some parents believe that it is better for their children’s future if they excel in the adopted language. For example, the vast majority of second-generation immigrants to the United States do not speak their parent’s language fluently since their children can integrate easier and avoid inferiority complex due to the language barrier. As a result, migration tends to change the indigenous speaking population, contributing to language loss. Another factor that hastened language extinction is economic growth and globalization. According to Herbert Schiller’s theory of cultural imperialism in the 1970s, the economically powerful nations hold immense cultural sway over the weaker countries they infiltrate. For this reason, dominant cultures and languages tend to have a profound impact on the mindset of the minority peoples, leading to their shift to acquire more prestigious languages to gain social and economic advantages or to avoid discrimination instead of developing their mother tongue. Consequently, the indigenous culture and language will gradually vanish when the successive generations no longer make an effort to sustain and evolve it. To summarized, the accelerating pace of language loss has resulted in serious repercussions to humankind. Such a negative trend is mainly caused by migration and globalization.