Hello, I'm Miquel Strubell again. I hope you enjoyed the first week. Welcome to week two of our course on linguistic diversity. This week, we shall be discussing autoctonous languages, that is languages that for centuries have belonged to and be used by whole communities right across the world. The vast majority of the 6,909 languages. That Ethnologue has listed and described. We should leave out languages that define independent nations, like Hungarian, or Chinese, or Thai, and concentrate on languages, whose vitality for various reasons is under threat. In the Americas, for instance, we're interested in all the languages spoken there immediately before European colonizers arrived, mainly from Spain, France, Portugal, and England; and also Creole, a language that slaves and their descendants developed from French in the Caribbean, chiefly in Haiti. Why are there so many languages? Each one developed inside a particular group that survived and grew. But only religions offer stories to explain this amazing diversity. The Tower of Babel, as I said last week, for example, was being built by the survivors of the great floods. who all spoke one language. But the God of the Jews and the Christians was a clear believer in linguistic diversity. He thought that this tower would challenge his power. So he stopped it being built and dispersed all those people, making them speak different languages, so they couldn't understand each other. Maybe other religions and folk stories offer different explanations, do you know any? Many late neighboring languages, in fact share characteristics without usually being mutually comprehensible to their speakers. And this has allowed linguists over a period of up to 200 years, to classify them into families. In some cases, the family has a very clear origin. For instance, in Europe, the way people spoke, developed differently, in different parts of the Roman Empire, after its collapse. So nowadays, Portuguese shares many characteristics with Spanish. So Italian, Sardinian and Romanian and Occident with Catalan just to mention a few. Because, as I'm sure you know, not all the romance languages I've just mentioned, have been adopted as a language of an independent nation. We should concentrate around the world. on cases where this happens, languages whose speakers find themselves under pressure, perhaps more and more so, to use another, more widely used language. In only a few cases, is there a deliberate attempt to make people drop their language and to speak another language to their children, and in public. But be that as it may, this often subtle process of subordination and language shift is what is happening in many parts of the world. We've chosen but a few, and this week in general terms, the following questions may be asked: Number one, are you familiar with folk stories, or religious beliefs that explain why so many languages are spoken today? Number two, as regarding linguistic diversity, do you agree with the English saying variety is a spice of life? Such a belief is of course, the exact opposite of intolerance, bigotry, and fear of the unknown. And number three, are you familiar with any case in which one language is being replaced by another, even as we speak? Just like last week, in our videos, our experts raised relevant issues. Some of which, at least, will I am sure capture your imagination. Some use their own language with subtitles, to add to your experience of linguistic diversity. So there you are. Take advantage of all the resources we put at your disposal, not just the videos, and then share what you know, so we can all learn together. See you again next week.