http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/world/18cnd-language.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
September 18, 2007
World's Languages Dying Off Rapidly
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say,
nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this
century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every
two weeks.
Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole
surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as
indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the
marketplace and on television.
New research, reported today, has identified the five regions of the world
where languages are disappearing most rapidly. The "hot spots" of imminent
language extinctions are: Northern Australia, Central South America, North
America's upper Pacific coastal zone, Eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and
Southwest United States. All of the areas are occupied by aboriginal people
speaking diverse languages, but in decreasing numbers.
The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the
National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered
Languages, an organization for the documentation, revitalization and
maintenance of languages at risk. The findings are described in the October
issue of National Geographic magazine and at www.languagehotspots.org.
At a teleconference with reporters today, K. David Harrison, an assistant
professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said that more than half of the
languages have no written form and are "vulnerable to loss and being
forgotten." When they disappear, they leave behind no dictionary, no text, no
record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.
Dr. Harrison; Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute
in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic
Society have traveled in recent years to many parts of the world, the beginning
of what they expect to be a long-term series of projects to identify and record
endangered languages.
The researchers interview and make recordings of the few remaining speakers of
a threatened spoken language, and collected basic word lists.
The projects, some of which extend over three to four years, involve hundreds
of hours of audio recordings, development of grammars and preparation of
children's readers in the subject language. The research has especially
concentrated on preserving language families that are on their way out.
In Australia, where nearly all of the 231 spoken aboriginal tongues are
endangered, the researchers came upon such tiny language communities as the
three known speakers of Magati Ke, in the Northern Territory, and the three
Yawuru speakers, in Western Australia. In July, Dr. Anderson said, they met the
sole living speaker of Amurdag, a language in the Northern Territory that had
already been declared extinct.
"This is probably one language that cannot be brought back, but at least we
made a record of it," Dr. Anderson said, noting that the Amurdag speaker
strained to recall words he had last heard from his late father.
Many of the 113 languages spoken in the Andes Mountains and Amazon basin are
poorly known and are rapidly giving way to Spanish or Portuguese, or in a few
cases, to a more dominant indigenous language. In this region, for example, a
group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also
have their own secret tongue, used mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal
plants, some of which were previously unknown to science.
"How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being
spoken by very few, is a mystery," Dr. Harrison said news release.
The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages
of the Northwest Pacific plateau of North America, a region including British
Columbia, Oregon and Washington. Only one person remains who speaks Siletz
Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.
In Eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced
speakers of minority languages to use national and regional languages, such as
Russian or Sakha.
Forty Native American languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New
Mexico, many of them originally used by indigenous tribes and others introduced
by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations there, mainly in
Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.
Another measure of the threatened decline of many relatively obscure languages,
Dr. Harrison said, is that speakers and writers of the 83 languages with
"global" influence now account for 80 percent of the world population. Most of
the thousands of other languages now face extinction at a rate, the researchers
said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish or plants.
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