The world's endangered languages

The majority of the world’s 6,000 distinct languages are spoken by 10,000 people or less. Within the next 100 years many experts believe that half of these languages, together with the unique cultural identities associated with them, will go out of existence. In this February 2000 article from Encarta Yearbook, language specialists Doug Whalen and K. David Harrison explore the causes and consequences of endangered languages.

The World's Endangered Languages By Doug Whalen and K. David Harrison: As the second millennium comes to a close, more than 6,000 distinct human languages are in use worldwide. Many linguists predict that by the year 2100, only half of these languages will still be spoken—a loss of one language every 12 days.

Why are languages disappearing?

The most fundamental reason is increased contact among formerly isolated human societies. Languages need isolation to develop and to maintain their distinctive characteristics. When isolation ends, local languages tend to disappear along with traditional ways of life.Many indigenous peoples and linguists are working to halt this trend, which threatens to diminish the world’s cultural and linguistic heritage. Much of a society’s history and culture is contained in its language. To lose an ancestral language is to weaken the links to the ancestors themselves. As languages disappear, a wealth of culture, art, and knowledge disappears with them. The world’s many languages also offer anthropologists a unique resource for studying how humans spread across the Earth. Much of what is known about the historical movement of human beings comes from the study of languages that were spoken by ancient peoples of the Earth.

Assessing Language Endangerment:

The precise number of endangered languages worldwide is difficult to ascertain, largely because the distinction between separate languages and dialects is not always clear. (A dialect is a version of a language that differs in pronunciation, grammar, and/or vocabulary). Determining whether the speech of a group of people is a dialect of a language, or has changed enough to be considered a distinct language, is a matter of convention as much as linguistics. Dialects of English, for example, may vary slightly in pronunciation, as with the difference between speech in New York City and Boston, Massachusetts. Or dialects may differ radically, as between speakers in the Scottish Highlands and those in the mountains of Appalachia in the United States. The latter dialects may be as different as Spanish and Portuguese. However, convention holds that the far-flung English dialects are part of a single language, while Spanish and Portuguese are separate languages.Linguists have yet to acquire good descriptions of the dialects of most languages. Even if this information were available, it would be impossible to draw a clear line between all languages and their dialects. Sociopolitical factors inevitably play a role. German and Dutch, for example, are national languages, but some Low German dialects of northern Germany are mutually intelligible with some dialects of Dutch. On the other hand, Chinese is often characterized as a single language even though it encompasses many dialects that are mutually unintelligible and are as different as English, Spanish, and French.Still, linguists generally agree that the world’s 6 billion people currently use more than 6,000 languages. The distribution of these languages around the world is surprisingly uneven. About half of the total world population speaks one of ten languages: Mandarin Chinese has 836 million speakers; Hindi, 333 million; Spanish, 332 million; English, 322 million; Bengali, 189 million; Arabic, 186 million; Russian, 170 million; Portuguese, 170 million; Japanese, 125 million; and German, 98 million. The people who speak these languages occupy a great deal of the Earth’s livable surface. Most languages, however, are spoken by 10,000 or fewer people.The greatest linguistic diversity is found in regions that sustain large populations, but where geographic features help keep groups of people apart. In the area of greatest linguistic variation, the island of Papua New Guinea, towering mountains and dense jungles create isolated pockets of various tribes, with about 1,000 distinct languages spoken by 4.6 million people. The islands of Vanuatu in the Pacific Ocean are home to about 200,000 people, and the Vanuatuans speak 109 different languages.In the northeast African country of Chad, which stretches into the Sahara, 127 languages are spoken by the nation's 7.4 million inhabitants. Much of Chad’s desert population is divided into small nomadic and seminomadic groups scattered across a vast, remote area. Experts believe that many of these groups have retained their linguistic and cultural diversity because of their relative isolation: They have remained largely untouched by the nation’s political system, state-sponsored education, and mass communications.Linguists divide languages into three categories by status: healthy, endangered, and extinct. A healthy language is one that is currently being learned by children as a first language. Healthy languages are generally used in all walks of life—at home, in school, at work, and in other private and public settings.Languages that are endangered are further divided into various levels of endangerment. In the first level of endangerment, in which a language is still considered healthy, the percentage of children who speak the language typically falls below the percentage for adults. If parents stop—or are forced to stop—teaching their children their native tongue, the language may rapidly become severely endangered, the next level of endangerment. A sudden shift toward severe endangerment has occurred with many Native American languages and with European languages such as Breton in northwestern France.The most endangered languages are called moribund. A moribund language still has native speakers, but it is not being learned by children; often just a few elderly speakers remain. Reviving a moribund language may require extraordinary efforts, including documentation, analysis, and intensive language instruction. Languages now classified as moribund include the aboriginal Nyulnyul language in Australia, the Native American Osage language in the United States, and the Finnic tongue of Livonian in Latvia. There are probably about 400 moribund languages worldwide.These dying languages may be useful for communicating with older generations. However, they generally lack the widespread usage needed to justify the effort to learn them. Children are efficient language learners, but they also learn quickly which language tools get them ahead and which do not. They will not learn a language simply because their parents or grandparents wish them to; they learn a language to use it.An extinct, or dead, language is one with no living native speakers. Dead languages include the Sumerian language, used by peoples of the kingdom of Sumer in Mesopotamia, and Oscan, a language of ancient Italy. Sometimes a dead language can be brought back to life. Hebrew, an old Semitic language that died out in the 2nd century BC, was revived as a vernacular tongue in the 19th and 20th centuries; it now serves as one of Israel’s two official languages. The modern language is based in part on the ancient texts of the Jewish Bible (or Old Testament), a collection of documents written largely in biblical Hebrew. The vast majority of languages do not have a written form, however, making this type of resurrection impossible should the language die out.
The End of Linguistic Diversity?

Prior to the 20th century, many languages with small numbers of speakers survived for centuries. The increasingly interconnected modern world makes it much more difficult for small language communities to live in relative isolation, a key factor in language maintenance and preservation.It remains to be seen whether the world can maintain its linguistic and cultural diversity in the millennium ahead. Many powerful forces appear to work against it: population growth, which pushes migrant populations into the world’s last isolated locales; mass tourism; global telecommunications and mass media; and the spread of gigantic global corporations. All of these forces appear to foreshadow a future in which the language of advertising, popular culture, and consumer products converge. Already English and a few other major tongues have emerged as global languages of commerce and communication. For many of the world’s peoples, learning one of these languages is viewed as the key to education, economic opportunity, and a better way of life.Only about 3,000 languages now in use are expected to survive the coming century. Are most of the rest doomed in the century after that?Whether most of these languages survive will probably depend on how strongly cultural groups wish to keep their identity alive through a native language. To do so will require an emphasis on bilingualism (mastery of two languages). Bilingual speakers could use their own language in smaller spheres—at home, among friends, in community settings—and a global language at work, in dealings with government, and in commercial spheres. In this way, many small languages could sustain their cultural and linguistic integrity alongside global languages, rather than yield to the homogenizing forces of globalization.Ironically, the trend of technological innovation that has threatened minority languages could also help save them. For example, some experts predict that computer software translation tools will one day permit minority language speakers to surf the Internet using their native tongues. Linguists are currently using computer-aided learning tools to teach a variety of threatened languages.For many endangered languages, the line between revival and death is extremely thin. Language is remarkably resilient, however. It is not just a tool for communicating, but also a powerful way of separating different groups, or of demonstrating group identity. Many indigenous communities have shown that it is possible to live in the modern world while reclaiming their unique identities through language.

Source: Encarta Yearbook, February 2000.