home | news l

Demise of world’s vanishing languages

June 2001 - THERE are 6,800 languages spoken in the world today, but, by the end of the century, up to 90 per cent of them could have disappeared.

One reason is that half of all languages are spoken by fewer than 2,500 people each, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a private organisation that monitors global trends.

Languages need at least 100,000 speakers to pass from generation to generation, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). War, genocide, natural disasters, the adoption of more dominant languages, and government bans on language also contribute to their demise. "In some ways it’s similar to what threatens a species," said Payal Sampat, a Worldwatch researcher who is fluent in French and Spanish and grew up speaking the Indian languages of Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Kutchi.

The outlook for Udihe, Eyak and Arikapu, spoken in Siberia, Alaska and the Amazon jungle, respectively, is particularly bleak.

About 100 people speak Udihe, six speak Arikapu, and Eyak is down to one, Worldwatch says. Marie Smith, 83, of Anchorage, Alaska, is the last speaker of Eyak. She doesn’t like the distinction. "It’s horrible to be alone," Mrs Smith said.

Researchers say it is becoming a struggle to find many who can say "thank you" in the Navajo language of the American Indian tribe (ahehee), "hello" in the Maori language of New Zealand (kia ora), or rattle off the proud Cornish saying: "Me na vyn cows Sawsnak!" (I will not speak English!).

The losses ripple far beyond the affected communities. When a language dies, linguists, anthropologists and others lose rich sources of material for their work documenting a people’s history, finding out what they knew and tracking their movements from region to region. The world linguistically becomes less diverse.

In January, a catastrophic earthquake in western India killed an estimated 30,000 speakers of Kutchi, leaving about 770,000 remaining.

Manx, from the Isle of Man, disappeared in 1974 with the death of its last speaker. In 1992, a Turkish farmer’s passing marked the end of Ubykh, a language from the Caucasus region that had the most consonants recorded in any tongue - 81.

Eight countries account for more than half of all languages. They are, in order: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Mexico, Cameroon, Australia and Brazil.

That languages die is not a new discovery; thousands are believed to have disappeared already. "The distinguishing thing is that it is happening at such an alarming rate right now," said Megan Crowhurst, chairwoman of the Linguistic Society of America’s endangered languages committee.

Linguists believe some 3,400 to 6,120 languages could become extinct by 2100, a statistic grimmer than the widely used estimate of about one language death every two weeks.

While a few languages, including Chinese, Greek and Hebrew, are more than 2,000 years old, others are coming back from the dead, so to speak. In 1983, Hawaiians created the ’Aha Punana Leo organisation to reintroduce their native language throughout the state, including its public schools.

The language nearly became extinct when the United States banned schools from teaching their pupils in Hawaiian after Washington annexed the then-independent country in 1898.

’Aha Punana Leo, which means "language nest", opened Hawaiian-language immersion pre-schools in 1984, followed by secondary schools that produced their first graduates, taught entirely in Hawaiian, in 1999.

Some 7,000 to 10,000 Hawaiians currently speak their native tongue, up from fewer than 1,000 in 1983, said Luahiwa Namahoe, the organisation’s spokeswoman. "We just want Hawaiian back where she belongs," Ms Namahoe explained. "If you can’t speak it here, where will you speak it?"

Elsewhere, efforts are under way to revive Cornish, which is believed to have died out in around 1777, as well as ancient Mayan languages in Mexico.

Hebrew evolved in the last century from a written language into Israel’s national tongue, spoken by five million people. Other initiatives aim to revive Welsh, Navajo, New Zealand’s Maori and several languages native to Botswana. While Welsh is perceived as a threatened tongue, Gaelic has an increasing number of learners all over the world among people who claim a Scottish heritage .

Governments can help by removing bans on languages, and children should be encouraged to speak other languages in addition to their native tongues, said Worldwatch. - AP

Language losses worldwide

North America: Eighty per cent of the 260 native languages still spoken in the United States and Canada are not being learned by children, one reason for language loss. Eyak, native to the coast of Alaska’s Prince William Sound, has one remaining speaker.

South America: Hundreds of languages died as a result of the Spanish conquest. About 80 per cent of the continent’s remaining 640 languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people each; 27 face extinction. Many languages from the Amazon region have fewer than 500 speakers, including Arikapu, which has six.

Africa: In the birthplace of nearly one-third of the world’s languages, 54 are believed dead, with another 116 nearing extinction.

Asia: More than half of Asia’s native languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers each, although three billion people, or half the world’s population, live on the continent.

Australia: About 90 per cent of its 250 Aboriginal languages face extinction.

Europe: Nearly 90 per cent of Russians speak Russian, the language enforced during the Soviet era. Consequently, most of the country’s 100 other native languages, nearly all of them Siberian tongues, are near extinction, including Udihe.

Source: The Scotsman

related links :

• Aboriginal Languages of Australia
  There are more than 200 Australian Indigenous languages, most of which have been destroyed; all the others are endangered. This site has annotated links to 140 resources for nearly 40 of these languages. About 30% of these resources are produced by Indigenous people.

Further information: language issues page - includes news index and external links

|| click to go to the top of this page