Endangered Language
Endangered languages are those at risk of disappearing due to a decline in their number of speakers or a societal shift toward more dominant languages for communication and education. Estimates suggest that out of the approximately six to seven thousand languages spoken worldwide, at least three thousand are endangered, with many facing extinction by the end of the twenty-first century. The loss of a language is often seen as a loss of unique cultural knowledge, as languages encapsulate distinct ways of understanding and interacting with the world. Factors contributing to language endangerment include colonialism, which often imposed dominant languages on indigenous populations, and voluntary assimilation, where communities shift towards dominant languages for better educational and employment opportunities.
Efforts to protect endangered languages involve documentation initiatives and programs aimed at teaching these languages to younger generations. Linguistic organizations, like UNESCO, classify endangered languages based on their level of threat, ranging from vulnerable to critically endangered. The preservation of languages is a complex issue; while some advocate for the necessity of language evolution, others highlight that the extinction of a language may result in the loss of unique cultural perspectives and historical insights. Ultimately, recording and documenting these languages is crucial for understanding human communication and for the potential revival of language use among new speakers.
Endangered Language
Endangered languages are languages or dialects that are at risk of being lost from human culture due to a shrinking population of speakers or a shift toward dominant languages for education, commerce, and communication. The National Science Foundation estimates that at least three thousand of the six to seven thousand known languages in the world are endangered and could become extinct (no known fluent speakers) by the end of the twenty-first century. Proponents of protecting endangered languages argue that the loss of a language represents the loss of important cultural knowledge, including "unique local knowledge" specific to certain cultures. A number of efforts are underway to protect endangered languages, including projects to record and document the world’s endangered languages as well as programs to support and promote passing endangered languages onto new generations of speakers and writers.
Causes of Language Loss
Colonialism and the forced assimilation of slave, captive, or indigenous populations has been an important factor in the extinction of languages. As dominant cultures colonized new territories, indigenous populations learned the languages of the colonizers to aid in trade and communication. In some cases, indigenous residents were forced to learn new languages or prohibited from using their native language. Forced linguistic assimilation was often used as a tool to reduce cohesion among native populations and prevent uprisings and organized resistance.
In colonial America, for instance, European colonists persecuted speakers of Native American languages and thousands of Native American children were sent to English-speaking residential schools and orphanages where they were prevented from speaking their native languages. Linguistic researchers estimate that hundreds of native dialects around the world were lost during the colonial era due in part to oppressive colonial policies. Similar patterns of language loss due to colonialism have been identified in the histories of Canada, Australia, and China. In Australia, for example, there were an estimated three hundred native languages in use when European colonists arrived, nearly one hundred of which are now thought to be extinct. Linguists estimate that as many as 95 percent of the remaining Aboriginal Australian languages are in danger from extinction by 2050.
In addition to forced assimilation, voluntary assimilation also plays a role in language loss. In many indigenous societies, parents encourage their children to become fluent in dominant languages in order to help the children obtain advances in education and employment. As a result, with each generation, fluency and familiarity with native languages declines and second-generation speakers that also learn to speak a dominant language are less likely to continue passing on their native tongue to new generations.
Status of World Languages
Linguistics specialists estimate that four hundred languages have gone extinct since the early twentieth century and that at least 50 percent of the remaining sixty-five hundred to seven thousand languages spoken in the world are in danger of being lost by the end of the twenty-first century. In 2015 about half of the world’s population speaks one of the ten most dominant languages: Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Lahnda, Bengali, Japanese, English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Hindi.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) supports efforts to document and protect endangered languages. UNESCO’s Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger, published in 2010, uses a scale to classify the threat to remaining languages. Vulnerable languages are those in which most children still speak the language but are in the process of shifting toward other languages for schooling, commerce, or social interaction. The next category, "definitely endangered," includes those languages that are no longer learned as a mother tongue. From there, languages can be listed as "severely endangered," which are generally only spoken by older generations, and "critically endangered," where the only speakers are elderly and speak the language infrequently. According to UNESCO’s 2010 data, at least 576 of its 2,474 endangered languages listed can be described as critically endangered.
Protecting Languages
Small populations that learn dominant languages are better able to integrate and reap the benefits of involvement in dominant societies, such as job opportunities. Language protection is a controversial issue as some linguists and social theorists argue that languages must evolve or lose relevancy as culture changes and it is unnecessary to preserve a language no longer seen as useful. Some, like linguist John McWhorter, also caution against reductive, essentialist views of language variation that conflate language with modes of thought and can be easily manipulated to stereotype others.
Supporters of language preservation argue that languages preserve and transmit unique perspective on the human experience. The study of language reveals details of human history that may not otherwise be preserved and, in the case of oral-only languages, without written components, the linguistic transmission of oral history through songs, stories, and poems represents the only available link to the cultural history of many societies.
In addition, supporters of preservation argue that many languages contain ideas and representations of the world that are unique to the language. In the Cherokee language, for instance, there is a unique term for the pleasant experience of viewing a young animal. The Portuguese language, similarly, has a unique and popular term saudade, which describes a deep emotional state of nostalgia and longing. Terms like these have no direct translation in other languages, and some linguists argue that the loss of language also represents the loss of important, illuminative, and unique ways of representing culture and the larger world. The world’s dominant languages have not necessarily achieved their status due to linguistic complexity or simplicity but often due to artifacts of history that led one culture to become dominant, thus resulting in patterns in linguistic transmission. Linguists argue that the wealth of the world’s languages indicates that there are many different ways to examine the world linguistically. For instance, in the Cherokee language, verbs are given suffixes that can indicate whether a related noun is moving toward or away from, or coming from above or below, the speaker. The Cherokee tendency toward physical placement of action is an example of how different languages reflect human culture and the natural world in unique ways.
The first step to preserving languages is to record and document the languages while still in use. The NSF’s Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Language Data (E-MELD) program, a computer-based system for recording and preserving world languages is one of a number of modern tools developed toward the goal of recording, documenting, and analyzing languages primarily in order to understand human communication and brain function. Other types of archives have been developed to record and preserve languages, many focusing on languages of a specific language family or region. One example is the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) project conducted through the University of Texas at Austin. Organizations like the Endangered Language Alliance in New York attempt to incorporate research on endangered languages from a variety of sources to facilitate the goal of recording and documentation.
While academic documentation may represent the only realistic mode of preservation for many native languages, some individuals and groups are attempting to preserve endangered languages in situ by supporting and promoting the continuation of languages among native speakers. Efforts to promote the use of endangered languages are more difficult, as rare or geographically isolated languages are often of little use in modern commerce and education. Linguists are doubtful that most of the currently endangered languages can be effectively saved with intervention and so the goal of documentation and study has become the primary focus of the endangered language field.
Bibliography
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