What Is an Endangered Language?

What does it mean to say that a language is in danger of extinction?

A language in danger of extinction is one that is likely to be extinguished in the near future. Many languages ​​are out of use and are being replaced by others that are more widely used in the region or nation, such as English in the United States or Spanish in Mexico. Unless current trends are reversed, these endangered languages ​​will become extinct in the next century. Many other languages ​​are no longer learned by new generations of children or new adult speakers; these languages ​​will be extinguished when their last speaker dies. In fact, today, dozens of languages ​​only have a native speaker, and the death of that person will mean the extinction of the language: no one else will speak it or know it.

Is that what happened to dead language ​​likes ancient Greek and Latin?

No. These languages ​​are considered dead because they are no longer spoken in the way we find them in ancient writings. But they were not abruptly replaced by other languages; in contrast, ancient Greek evolved slowly into modern Greek, and Latin slowly evolved into modern Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian and other languages. In the same way, the average Englishman of the days of Chaucer is no longer spoken, but he has become a modern Englishman.

How are languages ​​extinguished?

Absolute genocide is one of the causes of the extinction of language. For example, when the European invaders exterminated the Tasmanian at the beginning of the 19th century, an unknown number of languages ​​also died. However, much more often, languages ​​are extinguished when a community is under pressure to integrate with a larger or more powerful group. Sometimes people learn the language of outsiders in addition to their own; This has happened in Greenland, a territory of Denmark, where Liliuokalani is learned along with Danish. But the community is often pressured to abandon its language and even its ethnic and cultural identity. This has been the case of ethnic Kurd’s in Turkey, who are prohibited by law from printing or formally teaching their language. It has also been the case of younger speakers of Native American languages, who, as recently as the six, were punished for speaking their native languages ​​in boarding schools.

Is language extinction sudden or gradual?

Both of them. The destiny of a language can be changed in a single generation if the children no longer learn it. This has been true for some Yuppify Eskimo communities in Alaska, where only 20 years ago all the children spoke Yuppify; Today, Yuppie’s younger speakers in some of these communities are over 20 years old and the children only speak English. Likewise, Scottish Gaelic was spoken on the island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, until the 1940, but in the 1970 children no longer learned the language. In other cases, the languages ​​have decreased much more slowly. Iroquois languages ​​such as Onondaga and Mohawk, spoken in the state of New York and adjacent Canada, have been declining for more than two centuries; however, older adults still speak them and, in the case of Mohawk, also some younger people.

How many languages ​​are in danger?

According to one account, in 1996 there were 6,703 different languages ​​spoken in the world. Of these, 1,000 were spoken in America, 2011 in Africa, 225 in Europe, 2165 in Asia and 1320 in the Pacific, including Australia. These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, since our information on many languages ​​is scarce or outdated, and it is difficult to draw the line between languages ​​and dialects. But most linguists agree that there are more than 5,000 languages ​​in the world. However, within a century, many of these languages ​​may be extinct. Some linguists believe that the number can be halved; some say the total could drop to hundreds, since most of the world’s languages, mostly spoken by a few thousand people or less, give way to languages ​​such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Indonesian , Arabic, Swahili and Hindi. According to some estimates, 80% of the world’s languages ​​may disappear in the next century.