Each year on Feb 21, UNESCO (联合国教科文组织) holds an International Mother Language Day (IMLD). The event is to help people to pay attention to the disappearance of the world's languages; many of them are disappearing each year. UNESCO sees this as a terrible fact.
What happens when a language dies out? Something great is lost-not just sounds and marks but the way that people understand the world and communicate with each other. We keep different cultures and traditions through languages. Kill a language and all these are killed too.
Through IMLD, more and more people come to realize he terrible situation and try to stop it.
Google's 2018 Endangered (濒临灭绝的) Languages Project is a good example. Many speakers and protectors of endangered languages upload (上传) texts, audios and videos to the project website. They want to introduce the way that people communicate and express themselves around the world.
The Myaamia Project is the same kind of effort to revive the language spoken by the Miami tribes (部落) of the United States. Project members work to encourage people to study and communicate with this language, which died out in the 1960s.
These activities give life to those endangered languages. People who work to keep Languages alive are not limited to the past. Many young people design apps and use social media to support their activities. They "spread the word" to save the world.
So, while the problem of disappearing languages remains a very serious one, there is hope. We all have a special feeling of our mother language. This is why we should remember the wise words of late president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela: "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to a man in his own language，that goes to his heart."
