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In your Country

PostPosted: Wed May 17, 2017 6:59 pm
by Dora Aya
In Colombia, the official name is Spanish. However, there are also the native languages ​​of Colombia have been represented in 65 indigenous languages ​​and 2 creole and palenquero languages ​​and the Roma language of the gypsy people, born of the mixture between languages, a product of the contact between European population and African population Which came to the American continent enslaved.

The communities that speak the creole languages ​​are located in San Basilio del Palenque - Bolívar (palanquero), in the islands of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina (creole). The speakers of the indigenous languages ​​are scattered throughout the Colombian territory and the speakers of the Roma or Gypsy language are in 11 Kumpañy in different cities of the country, they have a population of approximately 1,300,000 people.
David Harrison, president of Swarthmore College's linguistics department and co-founder of the NGO Institute for Living Languages ​​for Threatened Languages, states in his book 'When Languages ​​Die' (2016) that "extinction of a language means erosion or extinction Ideas, forms of knowledge, and ways of referring to the world and human experience. " "No culture," Harrison adds, "has the monopoly of human genius and you never know where the next brilliant idea comes from.... We lose old knowledge if we lose languages."