▶ Your Answer :
As globalization pervades around the world and the number of minority who speaks rare language is decreasing, there is a controversy whether government should spend money to save languages that have few users from dying out. If faces a dilemma, because both goals, protecting cultural diversity and saving financial resources, are important. How can government deal with this problem?
Supporting financial resource to prevent rare languages from disappearing has a big advantage to society, as people can find out many traditional values from languages. By studying extinguishing language, which is the product of cultural tradition accumulation, such as songs, poets and novels, government can enrich the society's culture. Moreover, diversifying cultures can be transferred to the future generation, which will be helpful to the human history, as they can learn from many lessons written and spoken in these languages. Thus, the associated costs of supporting rare languages have many merits from a cultural point of view.
However, it is also right to argue that finance resource should be allocated on the basis of priority. That is, like an economic crisis period nowadays, government had better support public's general well-being, rather than spend money saving languages. Who can advocate the idea that allocating most of the government budgets to save a few languages while many people are in harsh living condition? It would be unwise to give too large portion of finance resources to protect them, as this policy will not be approved by many people. It just raises conflicts and dissatisfaction among people.
In this circumstance, the word 'balance' really makes sense. The size of the funds injected into saving languages should be prudently determined in terms of the availability of the fiscal budgets, and the diversity of culture. I would like to conclude by quoting one famous philosopher's idea about social issues. 'When there is a conflict, we should not see the other side as totally different from of my own position.' If we can cultivate and enrich rare languages by financial support, then we can use them as a cultural tradition and invaluable heritage, which can be a lucrative things, such as researching and drawing attention of many foreign tourists. From this, we can solve the dilemma! |