[Draft] Preventing Language Death

[Stoskavanya1]

Something I thought up quick. Not sure if this would be Education: Cultural Heritage, or something else like Human Rights.

EDIT: I am updating this periodically. I will probably not submit this to the drafting forum until next week, as I am submitting something else tonight, but any advice, even vague, from TNP would be greatly appreciated.

Declaring that while in some cases language may be a barrier, language can also a unifying element and important part of cultural heritage and coexistence

Acknowledging that growing globalization is hastening the death of many living native languages

Recognizing that loss of a native language is not only an erosion of cultural diversity but a loss for academic fields such as linguistics, history, anthropology, and other pursuits of knowledge.

Hereby,

Prevents member nations from forcefully enacting measures which aims to deliberately eradicate a native language through forced assimilation, language discrimination, or other efforts to shatter cultural identity for the purpose of language death

Again confirms an individual's right to learn and write, emphasizing for the purpose of this resolution an individual’s right to learn and practice whatever language they please

Establishes the World Assembly Language Revitalization Society (WALRS) which is tasked with, among other things;
A. Finding and recording the existence of any living spoken language within the member nations of the World Assembly
B. Evaluating the vitality of a language and its risk of language death
C. Documenting the basic grammar and phonetics of endangered language, when possible
D. Creating an accessible archive to publish the Society’s research
E. Assembling and distributing instructional material for the study of the language to target native populations
F. Assisting with the creation and promotion of programs which educate interested persons on the endangered language

Encourages members nations to foster healthy linguistic diversity within its borders

Nothing in this resolution should be construed as to prevent persons from becoming polylingual, establishing a national language, instituting compulsory language education, or any other unreasonable interpretation

Nothing in this resolution should be construed as to punish member nations for natural, unintentional language death or erosion

Q/A

1. What is language death/erosion?
Language death is a linguistic term for the end or extinction of a language. An endangered language is one with few or no children learning the language with serious risk of the language's termination in the future. One of the processes a language takes from endangered to extinct is called language erosion, where the dwindling community of speakers causes the language to lose diversity of its elements due to underuse.

2. Isn't this covered under the CoCR?
The CoCR protects persons of a language from discrimination, but not the language itself. There is many of underhanded ways a state could try to eliminate a language without being discriminatory to persons per se, which this resolution tries to address.

3.Why so many duties of your committee?
The community utilizes nonintrusive steps invented by Anthropologists to prevent language death. Efforts have been made to reduce the Society's workload by not requiring it to record every language's grammar, or any non-spoken/artificial language.

4. How about sacred/artificial languages?
This resolution does not target them, only native languages acquired or previously acquired at birth, a mother tongue language, which served as a communities primary language.

 

[Stoskavanya1]

Sent to the official drafting thread, new proposal is coming to TNP's drafting forum soon to sit a couple weeks while I work on these other two drafts on the GA forum.