5% of fish are endangered.
8% of plants are endangered.
11% of birds are endangered.
18% of mammals are endangered.
Now, nearly 50% of the world’s languages are endangered.
Last February, several teams of linguists met up in Vancouver, Canada, for the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The topic discussed this year was of high importance. Commonly, most summits are directed towards global warming and pollution, nuclear plants and economic hardships. This one was slightly different, but still linked to the outcomes of globalization: the extinction of languages.
But how can a language be on the verge of extinction? Well, let’s say you come from an Amazonian tribe, isolated from the modern world, and you have always been living with the same people and have no contact with the outside world. Since the population is stagnant, the language is buried gradually as the native speakers pass away. Another cause of this unprecedented extinction is when one language is abandoned because it is thought of as inferior and weak compared to another more dominant language. This is often the case with minority languages, they are commonly extinguished and replaced by official languages as the new generations become more assimilated.
Yet, the AAAS conference appeared to have been bearing fruit: the linguists who attended it took part in a project aimed at documenting endangered languages. They created software and online talking dictionaries. The latter consists of recorded phrases and words pronounced by native speakers of the target endangered languages; in other words, a bilingual dictionary with sound files. So far, eight talking dictionaries have already been created, containing more than 32,000 words, and 24,000 sound recordings. In order for this project to be successful, the teams of linguists had to travel to the areas where the languages and dialects are actively spoken, and meet with the local people to record their spoken language. The project, sponsored by National Geographic’s editor, brought the linguists everywhere from Papua New Guinea for the Matukar language to Paraguay for Chamacoco and Eastern India for Remo.
As an example of what the project entailed, let us take a look at the Siletz Dee-Ni language which is spoken by the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians (CTSI), a community of Native American tribes, whose territory originally spanned from northern California to southern Washington between the Pacific coast and the Cascade Mountains. They have since been relocated and now live on a reservation along the Siletz River in the Central Oregon Coast Range. The dictionary for this language was created with the help of just one fluent speaker. The words included mostly define and describe the population’s culture. For instance, because the Siletz people live close to nature and largely dependent on fishing, their vocabulary is richer around these topics rather than terminology related to computers or engineering.
The compilation of the recordings makes it possible for anyone to have access to them, to share them via social media, and therefore spread them so that these languages don’t die. It is a fact that among the 6000 languages and dialects worldwide, half of them are threatened with extinction by the end of the century.
Below, you can see the Top 5 Language Hotspots in the world. This map shows the spots considered as having the highest level of linguistic diversity, endangerment and least-studied languages.
We are not to forget that what makes of a people a nation is a territory, but what unifies them is a common language. Stendhal, a famous French writer, said “the first instrument of a people’s genius is its language”.
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