World's languages vanish at 'catastrophic' rate (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

World's languages vanish at 'catastrophic' rate
By Clive Cookson in Seattle

Published: February 17 2004 4:00
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1075982592589

The world's languages are disappearing at a "catastrophic" rate that
makes the extinction of plant and animal species seem sedate, linguists
told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in
Seattle.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance to science of documenting
endangered languages," said David Harrison, an expert in Siberian
languages at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. "Each language that
vanishes without being documented leaves an enormous gap in our
understanding of some of the many complex structures the human mind is
capable of producing."

There is no consensus about the number of languages spoken in the world
today, because experts cannot agree on the point at which two or more
linguistic varieties constitute distinct languages as opposed to
dialects of the same language, said Laurence Horn, professor of
linguistics at Yale University.

The most widely quoted figure of 6,800 comes from the Ethnologue
database maintained by SIL International, an organisation with roots in
Christian missionary work and Bible translations.

Stephen Anderson, also of Yale, said a mainstream estimate was that at
least 40 per cent of languages spoken today would die out during this
century.

Endangered languages are distributed fairly evenly around the world,
though there are far fewer in Europe than in other regions. The
Ethnologue database lists 417 languages as "nearly extinct", with only
a few elderly speakers still living.

As an example of what is at stake when a language becomes extinct, Prof
Harrison described two peoples living in remote parts of Siberia, the
Middle Chulym and the Tofa. In each case younger people speak Russian
only and there are about 40 fluent native speakers left in a population
of several hundred.

He said the Chulym and Tofa languages contained "complex cognitive
structures" not found elsewhere. They also embody a highly specialised
knowledge of the environment - medicinal plants, animal behaviour,
weather signs, hunting and gathering techniques - and a rich
pre-literate oral tradition.