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[Alyallen]

Researchers say many languages are dying
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON - When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to. Native Australian Charlie Mungulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction. From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.

While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.

In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many native languages are endangered in South America � Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia � as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

"When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday."

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.

That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, he said.

Harrison is associate director of the Living Tongues Institute based in Salem, Ore. He and institute director Gregory D.S. Anderson analyzed the top regions for disappearing languages.

Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he explained, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.

The key to getting a language revitalized, he said, is getting a new generation of speakers. He said the institute worked with local communities and tries to help by developing teaching materials and by recording the endangered language.

Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 percent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 percent of the world's people. Languages are more endangered than plant and animal species, he said.

The hot spots listed at Tuesday's briefing:

� Northern Australia, 153 languages. The researchers said aboriginal Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages, in part because aboriginal groups splintered during conflicts with white settlers. Researchers have documented such small language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, the three Yawuru speakers and the lone speaker of Amurdag.

� Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia � 113 languages. The area has extremely high diversity, very little documentation and several immediate threats. Small and socially less-valued indigenous languages are being knocked out by Spanish or more dominant indigenous languages in most of the region, and by Portuguese in Brazil.

� Northwest Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and the states of Washington and Oregon in the U.S., 54 languages. Every language in the American part of this hotspot is endangered or moribund, meaning the youngest speaker is over age 60. An extremely endangered language, with just one speaker, is Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon.

� Eastern Siberian Russia, China, Japan � 23 languages. Government policies in the region have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages and, as a result, some have only a few elderly speakers.

� Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico � 40 languages. Oklahoma has one of the highest densities of indigenous languages in the United States. A moribund language of the area is Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language in the world. As of 2005, only five elderly members of the Yuchi tribe were fluent.

The research is funded by the Australian government, U.S. National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society and grants from foundations.

___

On the Net:

http://www.languagehotspots.org
http://www.livingtongues.org
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/enduringvoices

http://tinyurl.com/2ndn4t

[Juregen]

The effect of Babel is coming to a conclusive end?

[jinju]

Natural selection. Some arent strong enough to survive. Not really anything to cry about.

[nautilus]

[LuckyNomad]

Languages aren't seperate entities. Language is like a tree with many branches that have many smaller branches, which have leaves.

Preserving languages simply to preserve them is silly. Most languages have no writing system and it is therefore almost impossible to learn them unless you're going to spend several years living with the people or person who speaks it.
Imagine what mankind would be like if everybody on earth could completely understand each other. I think it would be much better than having tens of thousands of different languages. Information would be spread faster and innovation would occure much quicker.

And languages don't always simply die out. Look at Latin. Is it dead? Not really. It lives in French, Spanish, Romanian, Italian, English and others. Eventually the English that we know will morph into something else, much like Old English became Middle English and that became modern English.

[mithridates]

In matters of preservation (deciding on which ones to give the most support to) languages should be looked at as families rather than separate languages. Technically Norwegian and Swedish are separate languages, but if Swedish was to 'die' and be replaced by Norwegian it would be much less a tragedy than if Basque were to die out, for example. Oh no, now we say jeg er instead of jag �r, what a tragedy.

There was an example of a discovery made by scientists last year that one type of butterfly was actually ten or so separate species and they never knew. Turns out though that in the native language in the area each one of the butterfly types had a separate name, so they could have saved themselves a lot of research by just asking them.

[mithridates]

On second thought, however, keeping related languages alive is invaluable for reconstructing already extinct languages. Reconstructing Vulgar Latin would be almost impossible if there weren't so many Romance languages about.

[CentralCali]

[riverboy]

Mithridates, you are just about the most intersting person I have ever had the pleasure to come across on this virtual wasteland of interesting information.

[LuckyNomad]

[mithridates]

[jinju]

Im happy, the weak deserve to perish

[keane]

[riverboy]

Thanks man!

[Tjames426]

Yeah for Wycliffe....

Love them or hate them. Those guys have preserved more tribal languages than any other organization in the world.