Endangered language

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 a dead language (or extinct language).

Identifying endangered languages

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

The number of speakers currently living.
The mean age of native and/or fluent speakers.
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. A language might also be declared as endangered if it has 100 speakers, but the speakers are all over the age of 90, and no youth are learning the language.

Some languages, such as those in Indonesia may have tens of thousands of speakers but be endangered because children are no longer learning them, or 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).

Causes

Causes for language homogenization include global trade, the internet, print, television media, governmental and/or educational policy regarding languages, and racial shame, among many others.

Debate over endangered languages

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 problematic 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 problematic 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.

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.

Examples of endangered languages

Main article: list of endangered languages

Curonian (Kursh) language
Ainu
Defaka, an Ijoid language of Nigeria
IstroRomanian
Livonian
Sami languages
Lakota language
Sorbian languages
Udmurt
Manchu
Chukchi
Wymysojer (Wilamowicean)
Most of the spoken Native American languages in the US and Canada are endangered.
- Catawba - Last fluent speaker died in 1996.
- Cowlitz, Eyak, Eastern Abnaki, Kalapuya, Klamath-Modoc, Lipan Apache, Serrano, Tagish, and Wappo languages each have only one or two speakers left.

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

External links

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.
Hale, Ken; Krauss, Michael; Watahomigie, Lucille J.; Yamamoto, Akira Y.; Craig, Colette; Jeanne, LaVerne M. et al. (1992). Endangered languages. Language, 68 (1), 1-42.
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 Hauge: 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.

Lists of languages

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Endangered language