Name: Eital Schattner-Elmaleh
School: Montclair High School
Committee: SOCHUM
Topic: Preservation of dying languages
Country: Cuba
There are about 7,000 languages spoken globally today but nearly half are in
danger of extinction. Cuba believes that these languages should be preserved. They are
part of the history and culture of our world and loosing them would be in itself a loss of
history. Cuba believes that dictionaries should be made of modern languages and dying
languages as to preserve them.
There are many committees such as the Linguistic Society of America Committee
which should be taken action on the preservation of these languages but don’t. There are
3,500 languages that are in danger of utter annihilation and are falling out at a rate of
about fourteen days. This is highly concerning.
Cuba believes that it is to the advantage of the united nations of the world to
better understand certain region’s history. We cannot understand this history if we can’t
interperate the written and drawn word. Cuba applauds the Enduring Voices Project that
Professor K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College, Gregory D.S. Anderson, director of
the Living Tongues Institute in Salem, and Chris Rainer, a filmmaker with the National
Geographic Society have undertaken in their long-term series of projects to identify and
record endangered languages. There should be more people trying to understand and
record these languages for if we don’t remember and learn from history, similar tragic
events may reoccur.
These dictionaries will be beneficial to every individual whether they personally
use it or not. That it why they should be translated into many different languages not just
the main Spanish English French and Chinese. These dictionaries should be available
online and historians should be encouraged to familiarize themselves with dying
languages as to not let these languages actually die.