Science

Living Tongues Institute lists top world language extinctions

by William Atkins

Monday, 01 October 2007

In association with the National Geographic Society, the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages has identified five areas of the world where the use of languages are disappearing the most--and extinctions are most likely.

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These regions of the world have a high average level of language endangerment, a high degree of linguistic diversity, and a low average level of past documentation of the languages. The regions, in general, contain aboriginal people who speak diverse languages but in decreasing numbers. The regions are (in order of severity of language extinctions, number of distinct language families, and lack of language research):

1. Northern and Central Australia (including Queensland, Northern Territory, and Western Australia)

2. Central South America (including areas of the Andes Mountains and Amazon basin; the countries of Ecuador, Columbia, Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia)

3. Upper Northwest Pacific plateau in North America’s upper coastal zone (including British Columbia (Canada); Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Washington (U.S.A.))

4. Eastern Siberia (including Russia, China, and Japan)

5. Oklahoma and Southwest United States (also including Texas and New Mexico)

For instance, a Living Tongues expedition to Northern Australia found that the majority of the 231 languages spoken by the aborigines are endangered, some so endangered that only a few people (as few as one person in one case) are still speaking the language. In the case of only one person speaking the language (Amurdag), the language in the Northern Territory has already been declared extinct.

The results of the report appear in the October issue of the magazine National Geographic and at the website www.languagehotspots.org (or http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices/).

According to the website, “Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them never yet recorded—will likely disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and how the human brain works.”

In partnership, the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute, through the National Geographic's Enduring Voices Project, are striving “to preserve endangered languages by identifying language hotspots—the places on our planet with the most unique, poorly understood, or threatened indigenous languages—and documenting the languages and cultures within them.”

The Living Tongues website entitled “Language Hotspot Project” contains additional information on the project.

The website of the Living Tongues Institute states, “Language Hotspots was conceived and developed by Dr. Greg Anderson and Dr. David Harrison at the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. It is a radically new way to look at the distribution of global linguistic diversity, to assess the threat of extinction, and to prioritize research. We define hotspots as concentrated regions of the world having the highest level of linguistic diversity (see below), the highest levels of endangerment, and the least-studied languages. Rather than simply counting languages, Hotspots take into account the number of language families (which we call "genetic units") represented in an area to calculate linguistic diversity.”

Harrison and Anderson intend to visit as many of these language-endangered areas of the world as possible in order to make recordings of the most endangered languages.

David Harrison is also associated with Swarthmore College (Pennsylvania, U.S.A.). Living Tongues Institute is based in Salem, Oregon, United States.

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