Tongues of Heaven

     In the documentary, "Tongues of Heaven" it focuses on the culture loss of small Polynesian tribes more importantly the loss of language in the tribes. This documentary focuses on the Polynesian tribes but it can be seen all throughout the world as with new generations the culture shifts. As seen in the documentary with each passing generation the language begins to degrade even more, leaving the older generations with no way to fix it but instead have to take a backseat and watch the culture and language slowly fall apart. Unfortunately with the language degrading so much it is starting to cause communication issues as newer generations only know the new dialect. There was one statistic at the beginning of the documentary that really surprised me, the statistic being, “among the 6000 languages or so in the world, an average of 2 disappear every month.”  This really surprised in two ways, the first being I didn’t realize there were 6000+ different languages. The second way this surprised me is how 2 languages disappear every month, this shows that the Polynesian tribes aren’t just a rare case, but instead this happens all over the world due to cultural shift from either internal or external forces. A conversation is needed to be started about how we can go about preserving languages and the culture that goes along with them as they are the most important part of a civilization and without them a civilization is never able to leave a mark on history and will be forgotten. 

Comments

  1. shawnAugust 21, 2020 at 12:45 PM

    I agree, the initial portion of the video stunned me when I learned that out of around 6,000 languages, 2 die out every month. I support the people in this video shedding light on this issue and it is also important to figure out how people around the world can solve this issue and preserve other people's language and culture.

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