Save the… Languages?
Posted in December 16th, 2009 by Shannon SorensenWe often hear about endangered species or the endangered rainforest but a new endangerment is on the rise that is worrying scholars worldwide: the endangerment of languages.
Did you know that, according to UNESCO, of the 7,000 or so languages still heard in the world, about 3,000 are at risk, and 199 have fewer than 10 speakers left? Imagine that, a language with fewer than 10 speakers! It would be like having your own private code that only you and your closest friends and family knew. It is said that by half way through the century almost all humans will speak one of a handful of megalanguages – Mandarin, English, Spanish – although often a poor version of them.
To better illustrate the situation, UNESCO has created an Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger that shows the name of the language, degree of endangerment and the country or countries where it is spoken. The online edition provides additional information on numbers of speakers, relevant policies and projects, sources, ISO codes and geographic coordinates. Users can provided input and updates online in order to keep the information up to date.
Why do we need this and why should we care? Well, besides cultural preservation, languages provide a unique vision of the world by varying groups of people. According to scientists, balance in languages, like balance in the environment, is essential for human survival. “Every time we lose (a language), we lose that much also of our adaptability and our diversity that gives us our strength and our ability to survive,” said professor emeritus at University of Alaska Fairbanks, Michael Krauss, during his presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in San Francisco.
Linguists know what causes languages to disappear. Demographic shifts, government neglect or suppression of regional and indigenous languages, the depredations of mass media all play a role. Less often remarked is what happens on the way to disappearance; language vocabularies, grammars and expressive potential all diminish.
“Say a community goes over from speaking a traditional Aboriginal language to speaking a creole,” says Nick Evans, an Australian National University linguist and leading authority on Aboriginal languages. (Article from The Australian) “Well, let’s just use talking about the natural world as an example. You leave behind a language where there’s very fine vocabulary for the landscape. Inside the language there’s a whole manual for maintaining the integrity of the landscape, for managing it, for using it, for looking for stuff. All that is gone in a creole. You’ve just got a few words like ‘gum tree’ or whatever.”
“There are times when what people speak is like seeing the
world through very badly made, thick glasses,
you can avoid bumping into objects,
but you don’t see all the beautiful detail.”
UNESCO hopes to reverse this process by creating awareness about extinction of languages and through preservation projects. The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages has a mission to document, maintain, preserve and revitalize endangered languages. Their free online movie, The Linguists, documents some of the most extinct languages in the world and hopes to learn from them before they vanish. For example, did you know that over 80% of plant and animal species that exist in the world have not yet been named or classified by western science or given western language names? But these species have names in these endangered languages. These facts alone warrants the preservation and study of these thousands of dying languages.
