Endangered language

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An endangered language is a language with so few surviving speakers that it is in danger of falling out of use. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language.

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[edit] Identifying endangered languages

While there is no definite threshold for identifying a language as endangered, three main criteria are used as guidelines:

  1. The number of speakers currently living.
  2. The mean age of native and/or fluent speakers.
  3. The percentage of the youngest generation acquiring fluency with the language in question.

For example, Ainu is endangered in Japan, with only approximately 300 surviving native speakers, only 15 of which use the language actively, and few youth acquiring fluency in it.

Some languages, such as those in Indonesia may have tens of thousands of speakers but be endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are in the process of shifting to using the national language Indonesian (or a local Malay variety) in place of local languages.

In contrast, a language with only 100 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the primary language of a community, and is the first (or only) language of all children in that community (most of Andaman languages, actually spoken).

[edit] Debate over endangered languages

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Some linguists argue that at least 3,000 of the world's 6,000-7,000 languages are liable to be lost before the year 2100. There are two basic views as to the implications of this.

One view holds that this is a problem and the extinction of languages should be prevented, even at significant cost. A number of reasons are cited, including:

  • an enormous number of languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers can chart the full capabilities and limits of the mind;
  • languages embody unique local knowledge of cultures and natural systems in the regions in which they are spoken; and
  • languages serve as evidence for understanding human history (see NSF article on endangered languages).

The view at the other end of spectrum is that this is not a problem and in fact should be encouraged. Fewer languages means better and clearer communications among the majority of speakers. The economic cost of maintaining myriad separate languages, and their translator caretakers, is enormous. For instance, a company could save a lot of money designing and marketing a product in one language, and with one set of instructions. The extremist position of this view is that all languages should give way to one single language, thereby creating the greatest economic efficiency possible by utterly avoiding all transaction costs associated with linguistic differences. It is unclear whether such a monolingual culture would be stable enough to actually reap such putative benefits.

Members of communities where endangered languages are spoken sometimes have views on these issues that surprise those at either end of this spectrum. On the one hand, communities can actively resist promotion of their own minority language, since children educated in the language are perceived to be at an economic or social disadvantage, when compared to children educated in a more dominant national or trade language. This is sometimes the case in countries like China or Indonesia, which have a national lingua franca, as well as many minority languges. On the other hand, members of very small linguistic communities sometimes express strong appreciation for the language as a means of communication as compared with other available languages, even in the face of disagreement from others from outside the community who are also familiar with it.

[edit] Reviving endangered languages

Once a language is determined to be endangered, there are two basic steps that need to be taken in order to stabilize or rescue the language. The first is language documentation and the second is language revitalization.

Language documentation is the process by which the language is documented in terms of its grammar, its lexicon, and its oral traditions (e.g. stories, songs, religious texts).

Language revitalization is the process by which a language community through political, community, and educational means attempts to increase the number of active speakers of the endangered language. This process is also sometimes referred to as language revival or reversing language shift.

[edit] Examples of endangered languages

Main article: list of endangered languages

For some examples of endangered languages that recently became extinct, see Extinct language: Recently extinct languages

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Bibliography

see also the large bibliography: Language death: Bibliography.
  • Abley, Mark. (2003). Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. London: Heinemann
  • Campbell, Lyle; & Mithun, Marianne (Eds.). (1979). The languages of native America: Historical and comparative assessment. Austin: University of Texas Press.
  • Evans, Nicholas. (2001). The last speaker is dead - long live the last speaker! In Paul Newman and Martha Ratliff, eds. Linguistic Field Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 250-281.
  • Hale, Kenneth; Krauss, Michael; Watahomigie, Lucille J.; Yamamoto, Akira Y.; Craig, Colette; Jeanne, LaVerne M. et al. (1992). Endangered languages. Language, 68 (1), 1-42.
  • Harrison, K. David. (2007) When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. New York and London: Oxford University Press.
  • McConvell, Patrick and Nicholas Thieberger. (2006). Keeping track of language endangerment in Australia. Denis Cunningham, David Ingram and Kenneth Sumbuk (eds). Language Diversity in the Pacific: Endangerment and Survival. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. 54-84.
  • McConvell, Patrick and Nicholas Thieberger. (2001). State of Indigenous languages in Australia - 2001 (PDF), Australia State of the Environment Second Technical Paper Series (Natural and Cultural Heritage), Department of the Environment and Heritage, Canberra.
  • Mithun, Marianne. (1999). The languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-23228-7 (hbk); ISBN 0-521-29875-X.
  • Sebeok, Thomas A. (Ed.). (1973). Linguistics in North America (parts 1 & 2). Current trends in linguistics (Vol. 10). The Hague: Mouton. (Reprinted as Sebeok 1976).
  • Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove. (2000). Linguistic genocide in education or worldwide diversity and human rights? Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-3468-0.
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