Sastra Inggris

Universitas Sanata Dharma
Terakreditasi A Nomor 7345/SK/BAN-PT/Ak-PPJ/S/XI/2020
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Studium Generale Spring Semester 2019 "Language Diversity and Language Endangerment"

The studium generale was held on February 11th 2019, at the Koenjono room and required for students of the 4th and 6th semester. The studium generale was entitled “Language Diversity and Language Endangerment,” and discussed the diversity of languages and the cause and efforts people have made to save endangered languages so far.

            The interesting topic in the studium generale was the discussion of why we need to preserve the diversity of languages, then what will happen if we only speak in one language. This topic brought several different opinions among students. A student said that it would be a good idea if humanity were to speak in only one language; he suggested that it will create world peace because misunderstandings arising from linguistic differences would not exist. On the other hand, there are also some students who said that merely speaking one language will neither create world peace nor avoid misunderstandings. The final answer given by the speaker was then we still have to preserve the diversity of language because we as a human culture need to respect each other’s freedom of speech, and if we were only to speak in one language we would only have one way of thinking.

 

 

            Dr. Dalan also gave an understanding of the need to care about language endangerment. If the stage of language endangerment progresses to language death there will be increasingly less diversity among us; language death will also cause the loss of identities among certain communities. Thus, there are several ways to save endangered languages in his presentation. The first one is return to “natural linguistic/cultural settings” e.g. socially, politically, economically independent, then the language revitalization and policy, and the last one is language documentation. (Dyas Putri)

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