'Status' drives extinction of languages

[David Gene Lewis]

'Status' drives extinction of languages
Bob Beale
ABC Science Online
 Thursday, 21 August  2003



A language's status in society is the best way to predict if it is
headed for extinction


Languages evolve and compete with each other much like plants and
animals, but those driven to extinction are almost always tongues with
a low social status, U.S. research shows.

The social status of a language is the most accurate way of predicting
whether it will survive, argue researchers in a paper appearing today
in the journal, Nature. They also suggest that active intervention to
boost the status of rare and endangered languages can save them.

"Thousands of the world's languages are vanishing at an alarming rate,
with 90% of them being expected to disappear with the current
generation," warned Dr Daniel Abrams and Professor Steven Strogatz,
both of Cornell University in New York.

The pair have developed a simple mathematical model of language
competition to explain how dialects such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and
Quechua - the most common surviving indigenous language in the
Americas - have lost out to more dominant tongues.

The model is based on data they collected on the number of speakers of
endangered languages - in 42 regions of Peru, Scotland, Wales,
Bolivia, Ireland and Alsaçe-Lorraine - over time. All have been in
steep decline over the past century or so, and the model suggests that
Scottish Gaelic and Quechua will be close to extinct by about 2030.

Previous models of language dynamics have focused on the transmission
and evolution of syntax, grammar or other structural properties of a
language itself.

Yet by comparing various influences that help to explain the steadily
declining numbers of speakers of each language, Abrams and Strogatz
singled out status as the single most significant factor that could
predict its extinction threat.

"Quechua, for example, still has many speakers in Huanuco, Peru," they
note. "But its low status is driving a rapid shift to Spanish, which
leads to an unfortunate situation in which a child cannot communicate
with his or her grandparents."

A language's fate generally depends on both its number of speakers and
its perceived status, the latter usually reflecting the social or
economic opportunities afforded to its speakers, they said. When two
languages are in competition, the one that offers the greatest
opportunities to its speakers will usually prevail.

The researchers point out that bilingual societies do exist: "But the
histories of countries where two languages co-exist today generally
involve split populations that lived without significant interaction,
effectively in separate, monolingual societies. Only recently have
these communities begun to mix, allowing language competition to
begin."

They urged active intervention to slow the global rate of language
decline, pointing out that their model also predicts that higher
status will keep a language alive.

They also cite a real-life instance where this has happened: "The
example of Québec French demonstrates that language decline can be
slowed by strategies such as policy-making, education and advertising,
in essence increasing an endangered language's status."

Similar measures may make a difference elsewhere, they argued.