Last speaker of Bo died

Mon Feb 15 23:15:09 UTC 2010

It seems surprising to me that the Unicode Consortium would keep this sort of data. Some time ago, didn't they decide they were going to stop issuing characters with diacritics, leaving it up to software writers to find a way to deal with them?

Another approach is to go to

http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Americas

There is a lot of overlap, though, which would make it difficult. There doesn't seem to be a way to simply grab all of the languages found in the region.

HTH
Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

On Feb 15, 2010, at 1:46 PM, Marion Gunn wrote:

> 
> 
> PS. to last wk's correspondence below, as I'm pasing this query back to the Unicode Consortium via list <unicode at unicode.org> to request a quantitative reply re "the actual number of American languages whose full character sets are currently supported by Unicode and an inventory of the names of those languages" (which stats I'll be sure to fwd to EL-L once I receive them).
> 
> Thanks, Ed, for the approximate figures you supply below, to which I am appending a more detailed answer I received via the ENDANGERED-LANGUAGES-L at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG. 
> 
> Mine was only a quantitive question, seeking only a straight answer list <unicode at unicode.org>. However, so much more has emerged since, such as  the msg below, which I am grateful to see, because, for any language to be (made) safe, it needs to be (made) safe in its own land, which fact Professor Campbell's msg below underlines so well, seeing time is not on the side of those American language communities which are fighting for survival as we speak.
> 
> As one NSAI advisor whose interest in ISO 10646 goes back 20 years and more, I have sort of taken it for granted that all of the characters need to write American languages (both living and dead), have by now been safely encoded in that Standard and, if so (even if not), that the Unicode Consortium can supply a final figure for the actual number of American languages it currently serves.
> 
> As to the number of unwriten American languages (both living and dead), some approximation to that question's answer would be in US Govt documents about the clearances or in records of the US Library of Congress dealing with Americans displaced or otherwise disempowered by colonial action and all that followed after, similarly to the Highland clearances on this side of the Atlantic, but a start is to list the names of all of the American languages whose writing systems are currently fully supported by Unicode, or not, as the case may be (someone said it doesn't support Mayan writing, for starters, but I do not know whether that is true).
> 
> Sincerely,
> mg
> 
> Scríobh Ed Trager:
>> 
>> Hi, Marion,
>> 
>> Yes, 300 is the approximate number for North America.  If you include
>> Meso and South America, I think it goes up to around 800.
>> 
>> For North America, only about 30 survive.  But I'm not sure how
>> healthy those 30 are.  Some are doing fine.  Others I don't know.
>> 
>> Unfortunately, I really don't know as much about the situation in
>> North America as I would like to.
>> 
>> Maybe someday I will have more time to investigate and learn more!
>> 
>> Best Wishes -- Ed
>> 
>>   
> Lyle Campbell wrote:
>> 
>> Here is one answer to the question in a recent interchange of how many American Indian languages there are/were:
>> 
>> When Europeans arrived, there were c. 280 languages in the US, 51 families (+isolates). All the c.150 surviving languages are endangered.
>> In North America (US & Canada), of 312 known languages, 123 are extinct (40%). Of 58 families (+isolates), 29 are extinct (50%); of 26 isolates, 20 are extinct (77%). Many others will soon follow.
>> South America: 112 families and isolates, 53 families and 59 isolates.  c.420 languages are still spoken; there were once 1,491 (according to Loukotka 1968), 72% extinct.
>> 
>> Since American Indian languages were also mentioned in global comparison, let me add a bit more.
>> North America's 180 language families (+isolates) [58 North America, 10 Central America, 112 South America] = 51% of the linguistic diversity of the world, c.350 families (+isolates). The world's total number of language isolates: 127; in the Americas: 83 (65% of the world's isolates).
>> America's proportion of the world's linguistic diversity: 51% (180 of the world's total of c.350 families (+isolates)).
>> 
>> More broadly, already 106 of the approximately 350 independent language families (including isolates) of the world are extinct, 30%.
>> 
>> These figures are very misleading, however, in a significant sense: of the c. 150 surviving American Indian languages in the US, only 20 are being learned actively by children in traditional transmission, and even for many of these 20, every year fewer and fewer children are learning them. Very shortly, this set of numbers and percentages will change dramatically (unless revitalization efforts are successful) ... a tragedy painful beyond contemplation.
>> 
>> Best,
>> Lyle
>> 
>> 
>>> Incorrect assumption. Straight question. To which, by nature, a straight answer is asked.
>>> mg
>>> 
>>> Scríobh Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven:
>>>> -On [20100205 12:01], Marion Gunn (mgunn at egt.ie) wrote:
>>>>  
>>>>> American languages are the most obvious examples, Jeroen. How many American
>>>>> languages were/are there?
>>>>>    
>>>> 
>>>> I assume the question is rhetorical in nature?
>> 
>> 
>>  --
>>   
>> 
>> Dr. Lyle Campbell,
>> Professor of Linguistics, Director, Center for American Indian Languages
>> Dept. of Linguistics, University of Utah, LNCO 2300
>> 255 S. Central Campus Drive,
>> Salt Lake City, Utah 84112-0492 USA 
>> Tel. 801-581-3441 (my Ling. office), 801-587-0716 (my CAIL office)
>> 801-581-8047 (Dept. of Linguistics), 801-587-0720 (CAIL), Fax 801-585-7351
>> http://linguistics.utah.edu/?module=facultyDetails&personId=167&orgId=301
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