25% of World's Languages Are Threatened

Many world languages may become extinct due to economic growth, a new study suggests.

Already today, several of the world's nearly 7,000 languages face a serious risk of extinction. "For example, Ainu, a language in Japan, is now seriously threatened, with only 10 native speakers left," said lead study author Tatsuya Amano at the University of Cambridge in England.

The United Nations has noted that half of the languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century if nothing is done to save them. "I personally think that the diversity of languages is associated with the diversity of human cultures, which are definitely worth preserving," Amano said.

Amano is a conservation scientist who normally works on species conservation. He became interested in similarities between endangered species and endangered languages.

"Both are seriously threatened, and the distribution of linguistic and biological diversity is very similar," Amano told Live Science. "Of course languages and species are fundamentally different in many aspects, but I thought I might be able to contribute to this urgent problem — language endangerment — using what I have learnt."

Searching for an explanation to the global pattern of language endangerment, Amano and his colleagues first investigated which languages were in danger and, using criteria similar to the ones used for endangered species, determined where those languages were being spoken. Languages were considered endangered if there they were only spoken in a very few places, if few people spoke them and if the number of people who spoke them was rapidly declining.

The scientists found that 25 percent of the world's languages are threatened. After identifying where the endangered languages were, they looked for any environmental and social or economic factors those languages might have in common, such as rugged terrain or rapid population growth.

"We found that at the global scale, language speaker declines are strongly linked to economic growth — that is, declines are particularly occurring in economically developed regions," Amano said.

One important implication of this new study "is that languages in the tropics and Himalayan region are likely to be increasingly threatened in the near future, because these regions still have many local indigenous languages with a small number of speakers, and at the same time are experiencing rapid economic growth," Amano said.

Prior studies in small regions had suggested economic growth and globalization were important drivers of language shifts.

"We showed that this is a global phenomenon, which I think is the most important in our findings," Amano said. "So economically developed countries with many languages, such as the United States and Australia, need immediate attention if their languages are to be conserved."

Economic growth may endanger languages for a variety of reasons. For instance, speakers of endangered languages may view another more dominant language as offering economic opportunities and integration into mainstream society, and thus forego their own languages.

There are other important factors that might endanger languages, the researchers said. For instance, policies regarding how languages are used and taught in schools "can be very different among countries and even within each country, and these factors may explain more detailed patterns in language endangerment," Amano said. "But it was almost impossible to collect such information at the global scale for this study. This will be the next step for our project."

Amano suggested it could be possible to forecast future threats to linguistic diversity. "There exists detailed information on projected future changes in the environment, economies and climates," Amano said. "Using such information, together with the findings of this study and further analysis, we would like to understand what will happen to the world's languages, where it will happen and which languages will be threatened in particular."

Amano also plans on finding out if languages with certain kinds of qualities are particularly threatened with extinction, such as those with complex grammar.

The scientists detailed their findings online Sept. 3 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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Choi, Charles Q. 2014. “25% of World's Languages Are Threatened”. Live Science. Posted: September 3, 2014. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/47657-25-percent-of-global-languages-are-threatened.html

Half The World's Languages May Be Endangered

What happens when the last person to speak a language dies?

Sometime in the 1970s, a linguist named James Rementer, moved into the house of an elderly woman in Oklahoma. That woman, Nora Thompson Dean, was one of the last persons to speak Unami, a dialect of the Delaware (Lenni Lenape) language. When she died in 1984, the language spoken by the Native Americans who left their place names all over New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania, and signed the famous peace treaty with William Penn in 1683, went silent.

Thousands of languages have gone extinct in the last few centuries, and an economist at Case Western Reserve University thinks the language of any people whose total population is fewer than 35,000, is possibly endangered.

That does not mean they will disappear, said David Clingingsmith.

“I think that’s what the data says on average.”

There are approximately 7,000 languages in the world, and 95 percent of the world’s population speak 300 of them. Half the world speaks the largest 16. According to the Endangered Languages Project, some 40 percent of the world's languages are threatened.

It depends on circumstances. For instance, scientists still encounter tribes in places like the Amazon that have been totally isolated from the rest of the world with their own languages. Despite having populations numbering in the hundreds, their languages only are in danger if they have too much contact with the outside world, Clingingsmith said. Without that contact, there is not much pressure to change.

There still are places in Europe, where a relatively small population speaks minority languages descended from Vulgar Latin that are mutually unintelligible from each other.  Examples include Picard and Walloon, both spoken in parts of France and Belgium. Even in Great Britain, there is a small population that still speaks Cornish, and Welsh never disappeared, he said.

But, when a language does disappear, a unique view of the world goes with it.

Once one is gone it is almost impossible to resurrect — Hebrew being a rare exception.

Possibly 4,000 years old, it stopped being a spoken language sometime during the Roman Empire and existed only as a language of prayer — written, not spoken since that time. (Jesus probably spoke Aramaic at home.) But with the rise of the Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century, some thought a Jewish nation could only succeed if it had its own language and Hebrew was the logical choice. So, one man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, invented modern Hebrew.

When his son, Ben-Zion Ben-Yehuda, was born in 1882, Ben-Yehuda and his wife spoke to him only in Hebrew and protected him from hearing other languages for years, making up words and syntax as they went along. Ben-Zion became the first person to have Hebrew as a native tongue in 1,800 years. Other families followed. Ben-Yehuda also helped create a Hebrew dictionary and form an Academy of the Hebrew Language, inventing words that did not exist in classical liturgical Hebrew.

Sometimes it worked: The Hebrew word for "computer," the academy decided, was maschev. Sometimes it didn’t: The Hebrew word for "television" is televiztia.

Today, 9 million people speak Hebrew, almost 8 million in Israel as a first language, and Hebrew has a thriving literature, including a Nobel laureate, Shmuel Yosef Agnon.

Other attempts weren't so successful, including the attempt to recreate Gaelic as the spoken language of Ireland. Some speak it, but mostly as a second language. While all government business in Israel is in Hebrew, the government of the Irish Republic still communicates in English and almost all of Ireland’s great literature is in English.

Sometimes governments act to protect a minority language against the majority. The efforts of the government in Quebec to protect French are a good example. Clingingsmith didn’t think that intervention necessary. As long as generations pass the language on it is not threatened. Dutch speakers, for example, do not feel threatened even though most people in the Netherlands also speak English.

The rise of English as a lingua franca – or a world-wide common language – does not pose a major threat to other languages, said Salikoko Mufwene, a linguist at the University of Chicago. In many places only the elites speak it and in some, China for example, you are more likely to find someone speaking English at a tourist market than in the government. Adoption of English is not uniform, and a large portion of the population has no reason to change, he said.

But dead languages often leave whispers. Delaware, for example, is carved into American geography. Manhattan, Passaic, Shenandoah, Ohio, all are Delaware names.

After Nora Thompson Dean died, all that remained of her language was Rementer’s recordings and a 12,000-word dictionary. The only other person she could speak to was her brother, Edward. And even if other Delawares indicated they would like to learn the language, that would not bring it back. They would have to use it regularly and make it part of their lives.

The difference between economists like Clingingsmith and linguists like himself, Mufwene said, is that economists look at census numbers; linguists look at the “vitality” of a language, whether it is alive, spoken by one generation to another.

When Dean died, Delaware died. Dean’s brother, Edward, who died in 2002, had no one to talk to. He was the end. Wekwihéle.*

*The Delaware word for gone. 
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References:

Shurkin, Joel N. 2014. “Half The World's Languages May Be Endangered”. Inside Science. Posted: August 20, 2014. Available online: http://www.insidescience.org/content/half-worlds-languages-may-be-endangered/1931

Minority Languages Fight for Survival in the Digital Age (Op-Ed)

This article was originally published at The Conversation.

Language is about much more than just about talking to each other; it’s one of the bases of identity and culture. But as the world becomes increasingly globalised and reliant on technology, English has been reinforced once again as the lingua franca.

The technological infrastructure that now dominates our working and private lives is overwhelmingly in English, which means minority languages are under threat more than ever.

But it might also be true that technology could help us bring minority languages to a wider audience. If we work out how to play the game right, we could use it to help bolster linguistic diversity rather than damage it. This is one of the main suggestions of a series of papers, the most recent of which looks at the Welsh language in the digital age.

Welsh was granted official status in Wales by the Welsh Language Measure 2011. This builds on previous legislation that sought to ensure that bodies providing a service to the public in Wales – even those that are not actually based in Wales – must to provide those services in Welsh.

As more public services go online, the language in which those services are presented is all important. At the European level, around 55 million speak languages other than one of the EU’s official languages. In the UK, the total speakers of Welsh, Cornish, Scottish Gaelic and Irish number hundreds of thousands.

Language technology advances mean it will be possible for people to communicate with each other and do business with each other, even if they don’t speak the same language.

Technology fail

These language technology and speech processing tools will eventually serve as a bridge between different languages but the ones available so far still fall short of this ambitious goal. We already have question answering services like the ones you find on shopping sites, and natural language interfaces, such as automated translation systems, but they often focus on the big languages such as Spanish or French.

At the moment, many language technologies rely on imprecise statistical approaches that do not make use of deeper linguistic methods, rules and knowledge. Sentences are automatically translated by comparing a new sentence against thousands of sentences previously translated by humans.

This is bad news for minority languages. The automatic translation of simple sentences in languages with sufficient amounts of available text material can achieve useful results but these shallow statistical methods are doomed to fail in the case of languages with a much smaller body of sample material.

The next generation of translation technology must be able to analyse the deeper structural properties of languages if we are to use technology as a force to protect rather than endanger minority languages.

Chit chat to survive

Minority languages have traditionally relied on informal use to survive. The minority language might be used at home or among friends but speakers need to switch to the majority language in formal situations such as school and work.

But where informal use once meant speaking, it now often means writing. We used to chat with friends and family in person. Now we talk online via email, instant messaging and social media. The online services and software needed to make this happen are generally supplied by default in the majority language, especially in the case of English. That means that it takes extra effort to communicate in the minority language, which only adds to its vulnerability.

Enthusiasts are live to this problem and crowdsourced solutions are emerging. Volunteers have produced a version of Facebook’s interface in Welsh and another is on the way for Twitter, so who knows what might be next?

It’s also possible for language technologies to act as a kind of social glue between dispersed speakers of a particular language. If a speaker of a minority language moved away from their community in the past, the chances of them continuing to speak that language would have been dramatically reduced. Now they can stay in touch in all kinds of ways.

More and more, communities are developing online around a common interest, which might include a shared language. You can be friends with someone who lives hundreds of miles away based on a shared interest or language in a way that just wasn’t possible 20 or even ten years ago.

Unless an effort is made, technology could serve to further disenfranchise speakers of minority languages. David Cameron is already known to be keen on an iPad sentiment analysis app to monitor social networks and other live data, for example. But if that app only gathers information and opinions posted in English, how can he monitor the sentiments of British citizens who write in Welsh, Gaelic or Irish?

On the cultural side, we need automated subtitling for programmes and web content so that viewers can access content on the television and on sites like YouTube. With machine translation, this could bring content in those languages to those who don’t speak them.

All this is going to be a big job. We need to carry out a systematic analysis of the linguistic particularities of all European languages and then work out the current state of the technology that supports them. But it’s a job worth doing.
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References:

Evas, Jeremy Colin. 2014. “Minority Languages Fight for Survival in the Digital Age (Op-Ed)”. Live Science. Posted: February 18, 2014. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/43437-minority-languages-fight-for-survival-in-the-digital-age.html

Language Vitality Barometer Toolkit for Detecting Endangered Languages Available Online

Tools and database of the EU project ELDIA now generally accessible / Wake-up call to policymakers to help save endangered languages

The EuLaViBar language vitality barometer is a tool that can be used to determine the extent to which a language is threatened with extinction. Academics from eight universities in six European countries developed the barometer during a three-and-a-half year project sponsored by the European Union. It is now available to anybody interested online at http://www.eldia-project.org/index.php/eulavibar. "We originally developed the barometer for the purpose of analyzing Finno-Ugric minority languages, some of which are very much in danger of dying out," explained Professor Anneli Sarhimaa of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), who headed up the study. "However, the language vitality barometer can generally be applied to all languages threatened with extinction."

The barometer is designed to help policymakers and stakeholders identify languages that are at particular risk. The information provided by the barometer is based on empirical data extracted from surveys. Once particularly critical linguistic domains have been identified, it should then be possible to put in place targeted measures and use available resources efficiently.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Language Vitality Barometer Toolkit for Detecting Endangered Languages Available Online”. EurekAlert. Posted: February 11, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/jgum-lvb021114.php

Dictionaries shed light on endangered Indigenous languages

Texts previously unknown to modern academics uncovered in research project that will help to preserve culture and identity

Hidden away on a shelf at the Mitchell library in Sydney sat what Dr Michael Walsh thought was a chunky volume from the New South Wales state library's vast collection of colonial manuscripts.

He pulled it from the shelves only to realise it wasn't a book but a box, containing two notebooks. He flicked through the first pages which contained, in Walsh's words, "a lot of doodles" – but on page seven things got interesting.

"A short vocabulary of the natives of Raffles Bay," it said. Walsh had just rediscovered a guide to the Indigenous languages used near a British settlement on the coast of the Northern Territory, written by the Victorian colonialist Charles Tyres. The text had been unknown to modern academics.

"At that time I figured, well, probably no one knows about this because I only stumbled across it by dumb luck," says a modest Walsh. But the notebooks form part of a huge array of documents uncovered at the state library.

A two-year research project, headed by Walsh, has sifted through 14km worth of colonial manuscripts that shed light on 100 Indigenous languages, many of which were considered lost before the finds.

Walsh describes another of the discoveries he's particularly proud of, a 130-page trilingual dictionary in German and the Indigenous languages of Diyari and Wangkangurru from the north-east of South Australia. Diyari has been undergoing a revival in an attempt to keep it in active use.

"Compared to some of the other resources that might be as small as 20 words, this is quite a substantial addition … so to suddenly get 130 pages from the late 19th century popping up is quite a find," Walsh says.

The jubilation of unearthing such a document is beset by a sobering reality. The federal government estimates that 145 Indigenous languages are still spoken in the country, but an overwhelming 110 are threatened with extinction.

These documents, collected in part to harvest knowledge amid attempts to exert control on Australia's Indigenous population, will now help to preserve that culture.

"There is a certain irony there, I guess," Walsh says. "One harsh view would say that the people who were collecting this stuff were colonialists who were basically intent on stealing Aboriginal land ... settling the country and opening it up to pastoralism.

"Whichever way you look at it their main intention was not necessarily all that benign for Aboriginal interests.

"In some instances though, [there were people] like Charles Tyres, who did have a reputation for being quite sympathetic towards Aboriginal people and treating them with respect, whereas the others it's not quite as savoury a story."

Walsh, a linguistics professor at the University of Sydney, obviously takes great joy in the academic rigour and investigative nature of the research but he is keenly aware that these discoveries have a tangible, pragmatic end.

"People, especially in New South Wales, will tell me that once I regain my language through language revitalisation, I also regain my identity, not just as a Koori … but I'm a specific people," says Walsh.

"Some of those people also say that once they've regained their identity, they sort of improve as people. There are people who have been dysfunctional with the police, getting drunk, not being able to hold down steady employment, they say that it's the language that brought them back into the world – because of that regaining of identity."

The research phase of the project is drawing to a close, with the next step being to disseminate the findings to the relevant Indigenous communities and language experts. The library hopes, with the correct cultural approval, to digitise the discoveries to make them more easily accessible. Walsh says speakers of some of the languages are scattered around the world.
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References:

Laughland, Oliver. 2013. “Dictionaries shed light on endangered Indigenous languages”. The Guardian. Posted: August 28, 2013. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/28/dictionaries-shed-light-indigenous-languages

Endangered African language explored

Children growing up in the Rufiji region along the coast of Tanzania are learning Swahili as their first language.

Consequently, their parents are expected to be the last generation to be fluent in the minority language Ndengeleko. A new doctoral thesis in African languages from the University of Gothenburg is the first, and maybe last, attempt ever to explore Ndengeleko grammatically.

More than 120 languages are spoken in Tanzania. Most are minority languages spoken by various ethnic groups in the country. Eva-Marie Ström, the author of the thesis, estimates that Ndengeleko, which belongs to the Bantu language family, is currently spoken by about 72 000 people.

'Although this is not an extremely low number in the context of minority languages, my conclusion is that Ndengeleko is indeed endangered and will most likely disappear within a few generations,' she says.

Ström's study is based on interviews and recordings and was carried out on-site with speakers of the language who are interested in preserving their knowledge for future generations.

'My research gives a good description of the phonology of the language, or of the sounds used. It turns out that it has a rather limited number of consonants and vowels. Moreover, some consonants have disappeared from some words over time, making combinations of vowels common.'

In Ndengeleko – as in other Bantu languages in Africa – morphemes are combined to form long words. Morphemes are the small building blocks of words, and they all have a meaning. Combinations of morphemes can appear differently in different words depending on which vowels and consonants are involved. A large part of the analysis concerned these complex processes.

Descriptions of languages are important in order to understand people's linguistic abilities and how languages evolve. Also, languages can reveal information about the people who speak them and how they approach life and the world around them.

'Traditional research on languages and cognition is still largely based on Western languages. My thesis contributes to our understanding of human languages,' says Ström, who is also hoping that her study will help strengthen the self-confidence and status of Ndengeleko speakers.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Endangered African language explored”. EurekAlert. Posted: April 23, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/uog-eal042313.php

Endangered language takes Aberdeen academic to deepest Siberia

An Aberdeen anthropologist will be braving sub-zero conditions in north-east Siberia as he embarks on a 10-month expedition to document an endangered language in the region.

Dr Alexander King and his family will relocate from Aberdeen to the remote town of Palana, on the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, where they will be based. He will also undertake an eight-week expedition to the more northerly reaches of Kamchatskiy Krai with two Koryak colleagues where electricity in the villages is rationed and the main mode of transport is small plane or helicopter. Dr King’s research will focus on two dialects of the Koryak language – one spoken by reindeer herders who are Chukchi people and the other by maritime people living along the coast of Penzhina Bay.

Documenting endangered languages

The project to document these languages has been funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) and it will be the first time anyone has investigated these dialects since they were first noted by linguists in 1901.

Dr King explained: “What little we know about these dialects is that they are markedly different from others in the Koryak language, which is spoken by around 2,500 people in the easternmost extremity of Siberia.

“While there has been considerable linguistic work on the dialect of Koryak used in publications and broadcast, these are two dialects that have been mostly ignored.”

“There are now only a handful of younger speakers so as a result the languages are very much endangered.”

A record must be made

Dr King maintains that it is vital that such languages are properly recorded before they die out and are lost forever.

“Indigenous peoples around the world are shifting from speaking their heritage languages to using socially dominant languages in everyday life, such as English, Spanish and Russian,” he added.

“But it is only by having careful documentation of the full span and variety of human language that we can really know what is possible and impossible in human speech and thought.”

“We have sophisticated theories about English and a handful of other European languages but we really do not know the full potential variation of the human capacity for speech.”

Dr King and his colleagues will record, transcribe and translate over 150 hours of Koryak speech across several genres using the latest methods and digital technologies.

The project will produce a database, a DVD of storytellers, and a bilingual book of narratives. It will also provide the skills and equipment for local linguists and folklorists to continue documentation work long after the project is finished and contribute to Koryak teaching and revitalisation efforts.

“The positive social effects are just as important as the science. This kind of work has been linked to successful community revitalisation programmes in other parts of the world. Pride in your heritage language means pride in yourself, and too often that is in short supply among indigenous Siberian youth.”

Language teachers

Documenting a language is a complex process that involves finding speakers who can serve as language teachers. This starts by recording words and expressions, transcribing them phonetically and then analysing the data to uncover the structure and functions of the language.

The result of this kind of documentation is often a dictionary and a grammar of the language but projects often aim to collect stories, narratives, personal histories, poetry and songs. In these cases, the performance of the material is recorded using sound or video recorders, but this too is transcribed, analysed and translated.
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References:

Past Horizons. 2012. "Endangered language takes Aberdeen academic to deepest Siberia". Past Horizons. Posted: June 27, 2012. Available online: http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/06/2012/endangered-language-takes-aberdeen-academic-to-deepest-siberia

Google launches Endangered Language Project

Google tries to promote info exchange on the world's 3,000 endangered languages.

Today, Google announced the launch of the Endangered Language Project, "a website for people to find and share the most up-to-date and comprehensive information about endangered languages." The project was built in conjunction with the Alliance for Language Diversity.

Google and its partners hope the Endangered Language Project will help by providing "an online resource to record, access, and share samples of and research on endangered languages, as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat."

Although Google helped develop the site, they plan to turn it over to the First Peoples' Cultural Council and The Institute for Language Information and Technology at Eastern Michigan University.

The problem of language loss is bad, and it's getting worse. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, estimates that about half of the world's 6,000 languages will disappear at the current rate if nothing is done. Languages change, some gaining predominance and others withering. To some degree this is natural. But with the accelerated growth of technology, the predominant languages are penetrating further faster. To lose languages at such a rate isn't natural. And when languages go, the knowledge carried by them also goes.

"With the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages," UNESCO said, "humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages."

Anyone who speaks more than one language has the experience of saying. "well, there's not direct translation for that word." That is because that word captures a segment of the spectrum of meaning that another language does not. When we lose it, we lose awareness of that distinction and the values behind making it in the first place. In much the same way that the growth of the popular word "impact" dulls the distinctions inherent in words like "affect," "effect," "influence" and "force," the loss of distinctions carried by the vocabulary and grammar of different languages impoverishes our collective linguistic environment. Just as the destruction of a forest, like those in the Amazon basin, may destroy the cures for disease, the destruction of languages may damage possible answers to our intellectual and spiritual questions.

"A diverse group of collaborators have already begun to contribute content ranging from 18th-century manuscripts to modern teaching tools like video and audio language samples and knowledge-sharing articles," wrote Clara Rivera Rodriguez and Jason Rissman, project managers for the Endangered Language Project.

"Documenting the 3,000+ languages that are on the verge of extinction," they maintain, "is an important step in preserving cultural diversity, honoring the knowledge of our elders, and empowering our youth. Technology can strengthen these efforts by helping people create high-quality recordings of their elders (often the last speakers of a language), connecting diaspora communities through social media, and facilitating language learning."

That's all pretty theoretical until a flock of kids on the Warm Springs Reservation teaches you how to say "horse" and "dog" in Sahaptin, a language they are being taught for the first time in several generations. Then the merit of language preservation gets pretty real pretty quick.

Perhaps the cooperation of an international corporation such as Google will focus a bigger lens on this problem and bring together various efforts at combating it.
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References:

Hopkins, Curt. 2012. "Google launches Endangered Language Project". Ars Technica. Posted: June 21, 2012. Available online: http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/google-launches-endangered-language-project/

Rescuing Endangered Languages Means Saving Ideas

While saving the world’s threatened languages may seem informed more by nostalgia than need, federally funded researchers say each tongue may include unique concepts with practical value.

Endangered languages don’t seem as self-evidently valuable as, say, endangered species essential to the functioning of a healthy ecosystem. If the world loses Chuj, a particularly endangered Mayan language of Central America, or Itelmen, a language with fewer than two dozen native speakers on an isolated peninsula in the far east of Russia, people will still be able to communicate. They’ll just do it in Spanish, or maybe Russian. And history will move on.

Human language, though, encapsulates more than just different ways to say to “hello.”

“The debate about the universality of language, that we all have the same ideas and therefore language is just a function of history, that we’re basically using verbs and nouns [to say the same thing] — that’s a hypothesis,” said Anna Kerttula, the program officer for Arctic Social Sciences at the National Science Foundation. “Or maybe it’s reached the level of theory. But that’s in no way been proven.”

As the famous example says, Eskimo have numerous words to describe what Americans would just call “snow” and “ice.” This suggests language systems don’t merely translate universal ideas into different spellings; they encode different concepts. And when we lose a language, we risk losing those concepts.

A lot of concepts are on the edge of oblivion — out of about 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, half are projected to disappear by the end of the century, if not sooner.

“That’s an amazing amount of knowledge,” Kerttula said.

She helps run a joint program of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities that’s been trying for seven years to fund efforts at recording and documenting endangered languages before they disappear. (The program received an infusion of $3.9 million last week to pay for 10 fellowships and 24 grants.) The project may sound like a punch line for another anti-science tirade from a small-government politician, but its work touches on fundamental questions about how the brain works, how people express ideas, how societies adapt and how human history has evolved. And of how researchers benefit.

“We’re talking about neuroscientists, we’re talking about computer scientists, we’re definitely talking about historians, anthropologists and biologists in some cases” working on nearly extinct language, Kerttula said.

The National Science Foundation actually has physical scientists working with Inuit people to identify different aspects of ice that aren’t captured in the English language but could inform our understanding of the changing Arctic ecosystem.

“If you don’t understand and don’t have the language for what ice is, what ice should be, you’re not going to understand how it’s changing,” Kerttula said. “Language is critical in recognizing change in your environment.”

One researcher receiving the money allocated last week, Jürgen Bohnemeyer at SUNY Buffalo, wants to know: If people talk differently about objects in space, does that mean they also think differently about them? He’ll investigate how spatial concepts are represented in 25 languages on five continents.

Another researcher, Pedro Mateo Pedro, will study how children acquire Chuj, the endangered Mayan language. Other projects will document endangered native languages in Oklahoma and the construction of Cherokee grammar. Some will develop learning and training resources for communities to record their own language.

A few of the researchers will be working with languages spoken by fewer than 30 elderly people. But the designation “endangered,” Kerttula says, isn’t necessarily a measurement of the small number of people still speaking a language. Rather, she said, languages become endangered when children no longer speak them.

Out of 92 languages known to have been used in the Arctic, for example, she says 72 still have some speakers. All but one (Greenlandic) are endangered, the result of the steady encroachment of other dominant languages like English into the domains of public schools and legal systems, television and now the Internet.

“Pretty soon, all of the domains of your life are in English, and the only place where you get to speak your native language is to your grandmother,” Kerttula said. “So how long is that language going to last? It’s basically not.”

The government program’s efforts of course won’t save them all.

“With 7,000 languages, that means 3,500 languages are going to disappear, and we’re funding how many projects a year?” Kerttula asked rhetorically. The National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities aren’t the only ones doing this work; some individual states, for example, have programs that include keeping native languages on life support. But the number of programs worldwide is small, and for each language that one of them targets, there are exponentially more elements to understand, from grammar to vocabulary to the cognitive processes of children.

Kerttula is effusive about the individual projects now trying to do this. But, she adds, “It’s a Sisyphean task.”
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References:

Badger, Emily. 2011. "Rescuing Endangered Languages Means Saving Ideas". Miller-McCune. Posted: August 19, 2011. Available online: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/rescuing-endangered-languages-means-saving-ideas-35246/

Endangered languages: the full list

How many endangered languages are there in the World and what are the chances they will die out completely?

This week the Guardian reported that the last two fluent speakers of the language Ayapaneco aren't speaking to each other.

This poignant story got us thinking about the number of endangered languages in the World.

To get to the bottom of this we turned to United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), who regularly publish a list of endangered languages.

UNESCO provide a classification system to show just how 'in trouble' the language is:

Vulnerable - most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)

Definitely endangered - children no longer learn the language as a 'mother tongue' in the home

Severely endangered - language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves

Critically endangered - the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently

Extinct - there are no speakers left

...

Finally, here is the full list of languages in danger and there is even more detail in the spreadsheet that goes with this post.

The UNESCO provide an Alas of endangered languages on their website. Do you have a nice idea for displaying this same data?

Full Endangered Language List
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References:

Evans, Lisa. 2011. "Endangered languages: the full list". Guardian. Posted: April 15, 2011. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/apr/15/language-extinct-endangered

"Lost" Language Found

Koro, a language previously unknown to linguists, has been discovered in the mountains of northeastern India. Researchers with National Geographic's Enduring Voices project recorded the language—spoken by only about 800 people—for the first time.



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References:

2010. ""Lost" Language Found". National Geographic. Posted: October 5, 2010. Available online: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video

Are dying languages worth saving?

Language experts are gathering at a university in the UK to discuss saving the world's endangered languages. But is it worth keeping alive dialects that are sometimes only spoken by a handful of people, asks Tom de Castella?

"Language is the dress of thought," Samuel Johnson once said.

About 6,000 different languages are spoken around the world. But the Foundation for Endangered Languages estimates that between 500 and 1,000 of those are spoken by only a handful of people. And every year the world loses around 25 mother tongues. That equates to losing 250 languages over a decade - a sad prospect for some.

This week a conference in Carmarthen, west Wales, organised by the foundation, is being attended by about 100 academics. They are discussing indigenous languages in Ireland, China, Australia and Spain.

"Different languages will have their quirks which tell us something about being human," says Nicholas Ostler, the foundation's chairman.

"And when languages are lost most of the knowledge that went with them gets lost. People do care about identity as they want to be different. Nowadays we want access to everything but we don't want to be thought of as no more than people on the other side of the world."

Apart from English, the United Kingdom has a number of other languages. Mr Ostler estimates that half a million people speak Welsh, a few thousand Scots are fluent in Gaelic, about 400 people speak Cornish, while the number of Manx speakers - the language of the Isle of Man - is perhaps as small as 100. But is there any point in learning the really minor languages?

Last speaker dies

"I do think it's a good thing for a child on the Isle of Man to learn Manx. I value continuity in a community."

In Europe, Mr Ostler's view seems to command official support. There is a European Charter for Regional Languages, which every European Union member has signed, and the EU has a European Language Diversity For All programme, designed to protect the most threatened native tongues. At the end of last year the project received 2.7m euros to identify those languages most at risk.

But for some this is not just a waste of resources but a misunderstanding of how language works. The writer and broadcaster Kenan Malik says it is "irrational" to try to preserve all the world's languages.

Earlier this year, the Bo language died out when an 85-year-old member of the Bo tribe in the India-owned Andaman islands died.

While it may seem sad that the language expired, says Mr Malik, cultural change is driving the process.

"In one sense you could call it a cultural loss. But that makes no sense because cultural forms are lost all the time. To say every cultural form should exist forever is ridiculous." And when governments try to prop languages up, it shows a desire to cling to the past rather than move forwards, he says.

If people want to learn minority languages like Manx, that is up to them - it shouldn't be backed by government subsidy, he argues.

"To have a public policy that a certain culture or language should be preserved shows a fundamental misunderstanding. I don't see why it's in the public good to preserve Manx or Cornish or any other language for that matter." In the end, whether or not a language is viable is very simple. "If a language is one that people don't participate in, it's not a language anymore."

Wicked words

The veteran word-watcher and Times columnist Philip Howard agrees that languages are in the hands of people, not politicians. "Language is the only absolutely true democracy. It's not what professors of linguistics or academics or journalists say, but what people do. If children in the playground start using 'wicked' to mean terrific then that has a big effect."

The former Spanish dictator Franco spent decades trying to stamp out the nation's regional languages but today Catalan is stronger than ever and Basque is also popular.

And Mr Howard says politicians make a "category mistake" when they try to interfere with language, citing an experiment in Glasgow schools that he says is doomed to fail. "Offering Gaelic to children of people who don't speak it seems like a conservation of lost glories. It's very romantic to try and save a language but nonsense."

But neither is he saying that everyone should speak English. "Some people take a destructivist view and argue that everyone will soon be speaking English. But Mandarin is the most populous language in the world and Spanish the fastest growing."

There are competing forces at work that decide whether smaller languages survive, Howard argues. On the one hand globalisation will mean that many languages disappear. But some communities will always live apart, separated by sea, distance or other barriers and will therefore keep their own language. With modern communications and popular culture "you find that if enough people want to speak a language they can".

In short, there is no need for handwringing.

"Language is not a plant that rises and falls, lives and decays. It's a tool that's perfectly adapted by the people using it. Get on with living and talking."

Visit the site to view an informative video.
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BBC News Magazine. 2010. "Are dying languages worth saving?". BBC News Magazine. Posted: September 14, 2010. Available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11304255

Linguist on mission to save Inuit 'fossil language' disappearing with the ice

Cambridge researcher will live in Arctic and document Inughuit culture and language threatened by climate change

Stephen Pax Leonard will soon swap the lawns, libraries and high tables of Cambridge University for three months of darkness, temperatures as low as -40C and hunting seals for food with a spear.

But the academic researcher, who leaves Britain this weekend, has a mission: to take the last chance to document the language and traditions of an entire culture.

"I'm extremely excited but, yes, also apprehensive," Leonard said as he made the final preparations for what is, by anyone's standards, the trip of a lifetime.

Leonard, an anthropological linguist, is to spend a year living with the Inughuit people of north-west Greenland, a tiny community whose members manage to live a similar hunting and gathering life to their ancestors. They speak a language – the dialect is called Inuktun – that has never fully been written down, and they pass down their stories and traditions orally.

"Climate change means they have around 10 or 15 years left," said Leonard. "Then they'll have to move south and in all probability move in to modern flats." If that happens, an entire language and culture is likely to disappear.

There is no Inughuit written literature but a very strong and "distinctive, intangible cultural heritage", according to Leonard. "If their language dies, their heritage and identity will die with it. The aim of this project is to record and describe it and then give it back to the communities themselves in a form that future generations can use and understands."

The Inughuits thought they were the world's only inhabitants until an expedition led by the Scottish explorer John Ross came across them in 1818.

Unlike other Inuit communities they were not significantly influenced by the arrival of Christianity in Greenland – so they retain elements of a much older, shamanic culture – and their life is not very different now to how it always has been. Many of the men spend weeks away from home hunting seals, narwhal, walruses, whales and other mammals. And while they have tents, they still build igloos when conditions get really bad.

Their language is regarded as something of a linguistic "fossil" and one of the oldest and most "pure" Inuit dialects.

Leonard was yesterday saying goodbye to family and friends in Eastbourne. On Sunday he flies to Copenhagen – "it's the only place you can buy a Greenlandic-Danish dictionary" – and then it's off to Greenland, taking two internal flights to get to the main Inughuit settlement in Qaanaaq on the north-west coast of Greenland, north of Baffin Bay.

There, Leonard expects to hone his linguistic skills and build contacts for seven or eight months before moving to the most traditional Inughuit outpost in Siorapaluk, the most northern permanently inhabited settlement in the world, where about 70 Inughuit live. It will he here that Leonard hopes to hear the storytelling that lies at the heart of the culture.

Leonard's interest in the Inughuits began 10 years ago when he read Marie Herbert's book The Snow People, an account of life with the Inughuits, but it is only recently that he learned how imminent the threat is to their way of life and their culture.

"I just hadn't realised how endangered the community was and this whole culture could simply die, disappear. Normally languages die out because it is parents deciding they don't want their children to speak it."

Leonard, who is 36, will have to adapt to many things, not least the extreme temperatures. Although the average temperature is-25C, it can plummet to -40 or soar to zero in the summer. Then there is the arctic darkness, with the sun expected to go down on 24 October and not rise again until 8 March. It is this time of year that elders talk and pass on their stories and poetry.

Nevertheless, Leonard admitted: "I don't really know how I'm going to deal with it, to be honest."

There appears to be a certain inevitability to the Inughuits being soon forced from their ancient homeland to southern Greenland, making Leonard's mission all the more pressing. Climate change is already leading to a noticeable reduction in seal numbers and the ice will soon become so thin that it will be impossible to use dog sleds.

Leonard intends to record the Inughuits and, rather than writing a grammar or dictionary, produce an "ethnography of speaking" to show how their language and culture are interconnected. The recordings will be digitised and archived and returned to the community in their own language.

"These communities, which could be just years from fragmentation, want their cultural plight to be known to the rest of the world," he said.

Although the climate change catastrophe facing the Arctic is well documented and the Inughuits are visited frequently, Leonard hopes his visit will be more meaningful than others.

"One thing I have been told is that they are tired of journalists popping in and reporting how awful it is that the icebergs are melting and then that's it, so they are keen that someone comes and lives with them and reports back."

At the bottom of the article there is a nice collection of factoids about endangered languages. Check it out.
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References:

Brown, Mark. 2010. "Linguist on mission to save Inuit 'fossil language' disappearing with the ice". The Guardian. Posted: August 13, 2010. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/13/inuit-language-culture-threatened

Phase 1 of survey to map Himalayan languages to begin soon

VADODARA: The first phase of the ambitious project of People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) will begin later this month, in which a survey on Himalayan languages and of central tribal belt of India will be carried out. The decision to launch PLSI initiative was taken by city-based NGO Bhasha Research and Publication Centre (BRPC) at the national meet 'Bhasha Confluence' held in the city.

This survey will recreate history after 100 years. George Abraham Grierson had produced a 12-volume Linguistic Survey of India (1903-1923) material for which was collected in the last decade of the 19th century. In fact, the results of PLSI will be in juxtaposition to Grierson's survey.

Even in 2007, the Linguistic Survey of India was planned and touted as the biggest ever to be conducted in the world. Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysore was to conduct it, but the exercise was abandoned.

Now, finally, BRPC is going to undertake this initiative to ensure that each and every language in the country is documented. "It was during the Bhasha Confluence that all the delegates and representatives from across the country expressed the need to have a linguistic survey. Many felt that their language was not represented well. As a solution, we volunteered to conduct the survey where the speaker of the language will furnish the details," said founder trustee of BRPC professor Ganesh Devy.

The survey will not be an official exercise but a people's endeavour and will also look at India's historical, social, political and cultural aspects besides linguistics. "We have prepared an outline of questions and also invited scholars
and cultural activists to contribute to the survey. By April 15, we will finalise the names of contributing authors. The survey documents will be scrutinised and finalised by a team of professional linguists at a workshop to be held at Keylong Museum at Himlok. The volume of the survey report will be published by July end," added Devy.

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References:

Chaturved, Darshana. 2010. "Phase 1 of survey to map Himalayan languages to begin soon".Times of India. Posted: April 4, 2010. Available online: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5760838.cms

Speaking in Tongues: The History of Language Episode # 5 Life and Death - preview

This is the final episode in the preview of the documentary. Just a reminder that you can purchase the DVD through this site.

Speaking in Tongues: The History of Language Episode # 5 Life and Death - preview. It is predicted that within a century more than half of the worlds languages will become extinct, but as languages are lost, new ones emerge naturally or are constructed. In this program, Noam Chomsky; Esperantist Thomas Eccard; endangered languages researcher Peter Ladefoged, who has since passed away; and others provide insights into the language life cycle. Topics include constructed languages such as Esperanto, language endangerment and preservation, and the role of globalization in language obsolescence. The experts also discuss current language trends and offer their opinions on which languages may emerge as front-runners of the future. (48 minutes) One part of a five part ground breaking documentary series
Produced by Syncopated Productions Inc.