Worlds Languages Dissapearing

[Andre Cramblit]

Alarm raised on world's disappearing languages

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

15 May 2003

The number of "living" languages spoken in the world is dwindling faster
than the decline in the planet's wildlife, according to a new study.

A comparison of the factors affecting the loss of languages and the demise
of wild animals has found that the world's 6,000-plus tongues are facing
the biggest risk of extinction.

"The threats to birds and mammals are well known but it turns out that
languages are far more threatened," said Professor Bill Sutherland, a
population biologist at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.

Linguists estimate that there are 6,809 "living" languages in the world
today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and
some languages are even rarer ? 46 are known to have just one native
speaker. "There are 357 languages with under 50 speakers. Rare languages
are more likely to show evidence of decline than commoner ones," Professor
Sutherland said.

By applying the same principles used to classify the risk to birds and
mammals, Professor Sutherland demonstrated that languages were subject to
similar forces of extinction.

In the study published in Nature, Professor Sutherland found that the
factors that increased the diversity of animal species ? notably forest
cover, tropical climates and mountainous topography ? were also those that
influence the richness of local languages. "Countries with large numbers of
languages are those with the most forests, are nearer the tropics and with
mountain ranges. The same factors affect the number of bird species," he
said.

Over the past 500 years, about 4.5 per cent of the total number of
described languages have disappeared, compared with 1.3 per cent of birds
and 1.9 per cent of mammals. Colonisation has had the strongest influence.
Of the 176 living languages spoken by the tribes of North America, 52 have
become extinct since 1600. Of the 235 languages spoken by the Aboriginal
Australians, 31 have disappeared.

Professor Sutherland said that when comparisons were made to threatened
animals, there was a substantially higher proportion of languages that
could be considered "critically endangered", "endangered" or "vulnerable" ?
the three classifications used to describe the threat to birds and mammals.
"My extinction risk classification for languages is conservative ... Even
with this, it is clear that the risks to languages exceed those to birds
and mammals," Professor Sutherland said.

A well-established phenomenon that comes into play when a species declines
to small numbers is called the Allee effect ? for example when further
breeding drops off because animals have difficulty finding a mate. A
similar effect may also occur with rare languages. "People just don't want
to learn them because they know there are so few others who can speak it,"
he said. The Leco language of the Bolivian Andes, for instance, is spoken
by about 20 people. The Cambap language of Cameroon in Central Africa is
used by just 30 native speakers.

Some languages are important because they contain unique characteristics.
The Yeli Dnye tongue of the people who live on Rossel Island, in Papua New
Guinea, for example, contains unusual sounds and a vocabulary that upsets
the universal terminology for describing colours.

Professor Sutherland found that although mountains, forests and the tropics
were common factors behind the diversity of animals and languages, both
types of extinction did not necessarily occur in the same regions of the
world.

Between 200 and 250 languages are spoken by more than a million people,
with Chinese Mandarin, English and Spanish being the three most popular
tongues.