Many languages going extinct

Remarkably, about half of the languages currently spoken in the world are said to be in danger of going extinct during the coming century. A story in the International Herald Tribune reports:

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.

Some 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 Tuesday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.

These facts are the result of research done by the National Geographic Society, which also ran a recent story on the topic:

…in most cases, languages die a slow death, as people simply abandon their native tongues when they become surrounded by people speaking a more common language…

“Languages not being learned by children are not just endangered – they’re doomed,” said Lyle Campbell, a linguistics professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

This summer, the Enduring Voices researchers traveled to Australia, whose aboriginal languages are among the world’s most endangered.

In the Northern Territory, the team documented three speakers of Magati Ke. In western Australia, they found three speakers of the little-known Yawuru language. Deep in the outback, they also located a man with rudimentary knowledge of Amurdag, a language previously declared extinct.

“Australia is amazing, because humans have been there for 50,000 years, and they represent an unbroken link to the past in a way that other places on Earth don’t,” Swarthmore’s Harrison said.

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