Languages in the road to extinction

Languages die when they are no longer spoken. This happens for various reasons. First of all when those who speak the language die because of natural disasters or genocide. When Europeans eradicated the inhabitants of Tasmania, in the nineteenth century, many languages died with them. Just like, within two hundred years from the arrival of the Europeans in America, many, many languages died together with 90 percent of the indigenous population killed by diseases imported by the colonizers.

War and dispersion can rapidly destroy a linguistic community within a few generations. Political choices can also lead to the death of a language: it happens when the dominate group in power opts for assimilation (cultural, religious, linguistic) of the minority groups and so bans languages different from theirs – in schools, in public- in the name of national unity and of a single language. There are many examples: it happened to the Kurds in Turkey, to the Australian Aboriginals-when the government and the church, for almost the whole twentieth century, removed their children so that they could be raised “the right way”- to native Americans.

The market also plays a part, in the sense that if a minority language isn’t used for economic exchange it is not likely to survive.

And the market is now global, with communities that have become like the stronger ones. It’s the end of geographic isolation. Urbanization and globalization create a scene made of global languages for global markets and dominant cultural models, to which new generations aspire and adapt, often preferring to abandon their origins, from cultural to linguistic identity, because that model is perceived as better.

Languages that are really in danger are those spoken only by old people and no longer taught to children – due to external causes or internal circumstances of the community dictated by the modification of the socio-economic context in which the languages were born.



















Vanishing Languages Identified
Oklahoma Is Among Places Where Tongues Are Disappearing



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Oklahoma has earned the dubious distinction of being one of the five worst "language-loss hotspots" in the world -- places where native languages are going extinct the fastest -- according to an analysis released yesterday.

The Sooner State's inclusion in the global top five is a reminder, researchers said, that the United States has a long history of linguistic diversity and that the problem of language extinctions is not limited to distant lands.

Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken, about half are expected to disappear in this century, said K. David Harrison, a Swarthmore College linguist and co-director of the Enduring Voices project. That collaboration between the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages of Salem, Ore., assembled the latest statistics on global language loss.

While previous analyses have focused on individual languages that have just one or a few surviving speakers, Harrison and his colleagues took a geographic approach, identifying where in the world languages are disappearing fastest. Oklahoma and nearby areas of the American Southwest, it turns out, have an extremely rich linguistic fabric because of the many Native American tribes that were corralled there in the 1800s.

Today those languages are disappearing by the month, and with them a treasure trove of ecological insights, culinary and medicinal secrets and complex cultural histories, including mythologies that can teach a lot about universal human fears and aspirations, Harrison said.

"It may seem frivolous, but mythological traditions are attempts to make sense of the universe, and the different ways that the human mind has tried to grapple with the unknown and the unknowable are of scientific interest," he said.

Following in the footsteps of early colonialists, but carrying high-quality digital video and audio equipment instead of guns and trinkets, the Enduring Voices project has launched a number of expeditions to document dying languages, about half of which have no written form. Where there is interest in preserving those tongues, it has helped create teaching materials for use in local classrooms.

The venture's analysis, based in part on scholarly research and presented in a telephone news conference yesterday, took three factors into account in identifying the "hotspots": The diversity of languages spoken, the number of living speakers and how old they are, and the extent to which the languages have been documented.

Among those on the brink of extinction in Oklahoma is Yuchi, a language native to the same-named tribe from Tennessee and believed to be unrelated to any other in the world. It is spoken by just a handful of elders because youngsters in government boarding schools were punished if they veered from English. Yuchi tales tell of Earth's creation from water with the help of a crawfish and the emergence of the tribe's forebears from a drop of menstrual blood in the sky.

The other four hotspots are:


¿ Northern Australia, where project members recorded the last known speaker of Amurdag -- a man who remembers about 100 words that he last heard spoken by his now-deceased father.



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