WORLD'S LANGUAGES DISAPPEARING AT ALARMING RATE (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

WORLD'S LANGUAGES DISAPPEARING AT ALARMING RATE

HALF OF ALL KNOWN LANGUAGES MAY DISAPPEAR BY 2100, MORE THAN 3,000
CULTURES LOST

6 October 2006
http://www.casavaria.com/sentido/culture/2006/06-1006-lang-disappearing.html

The world's three most widely-spoken languages, English, Spanish and
Mandarin, each enjoy more than 450 million speakers worldwide. These
languages are increasingly useful for international business and for
diplomacy in an interconnected global society. But languages with fewer
than 10 million speakers are now considered "minor" and many
long-standing cultures are in danger of disappearing, as only a handful
of people remain who can speak them.

In North America, there are now only half the number of indigenous
languages spoken as there were 500 years ago, when Europeans began to
settle permanently. There are 329 distinct languages spoken in the
United States, roughly half indigenous, and yet radical conservatives
intent on halting immigration are trying to establish English as the
single language in which people are allowed to communicate with their
government.

Of the 3 major dialects of Lenape, once spoken widely by pre-colonial
tribes throughout modern New Jersey, Delaware, New York and
Connecticut, only one remains. It is now spoken almost exclusively on
reservations in Oklahoma and Ontario, and is largely forgotten by the
two youngest generations descended from the Lenape tribes.

In January 2005, the BBC reported on the withering of the Mati Ke
language of aboriginal peoples of Australia's northern coast along the
Timor Sea. Only 3 speakers remain. Two are brother and sister and are
forbidden by their tribal custom from speaking to one another after
puberty. The third does not live in the area and speaks a different
dialect of the language. This means that of the three speakers
remaining, their is virtually no common interaction, and no one to pass
the language to.

There is an ecology of ideas and linguistics, just as there is ecology
in natural systems, and the ecology that favors broad diversity in
human language is severely out of balance. Fewer words, fewer languages
overall, means a less diverse linguistic fauna for representing the
flora and fauna of the natural world and of human experience.

A select minority, only 200 of the 6,800 languages in use today are
spoken by more than 1 million people, and the trend is toward less
diversity, which means less resiliency in the realm of ideas, less
formal elasticity through which to arrive at new or common ideas.

In 2003, Sentido reported that 10% of all languages spoken have fewer
than 100 speakers. Such languages are in imminent peril of extinction,
and many have no formal written grammar or tradition of textual
learning to help them survive even in study.

When these languages fall away before the global influence of the most
dominant languages, ideas and perspectives are lost with them. All
languages are peppered with or nearly whole-built of words derived from
other languages, some prior and ancestral, some parallel and
contemporary.

The Endangered Language Initiative (ELI) lists 750 languages that have
become extinct or are on the brink of extinction. Of the 154 indigenous
languages still spoken in the territory of the United States, 7 are
spoken by only one person, another 35 by 10 or fewer. Among these are
languages whose cultures were once well known, such as Osage, Wichita
and Pawnee.

The BBC report from 2005 also recounts a telling story from the age of
European exploration of South America. When the German explorer von
Humboldt reached the Orinoco village of Maypures, roughly 200 years
ago, "he heard a parrot speaking and asked the villagers what it was
saying. None knew since the parrot spoke Atures and was its last native
speaker."

In the United Kingdom, which includes the 3 nations on the island of
Great Britain, as well as the territory of Northern Ireland, there has
been an effort to revive fading languages like Welsh. The effort in
Wales has had important successes, and has become popular among young
people, as a sign of identity and as a way of crafting a unique and
relevant popular culture.

The Ethnopoetics section of Ubu reports that efforts to digitalize
fading langauges are being invigorated, but are racing against time and
are steeply challenged by the problem of "new media formats", meaning
both the rapid progression of storage methods and the often frustrating
inability of new machines to read devices used for storage only a few
years earlier.

For that reason, there is an effort to formulate a platform based on
XML, the eXtensible Mark-up Language designed to be compatible with all
variants of web-coding, and which should provide a means of recuperating
files well into the future. The Open Language Archives Community is
helping to study and to define such a platform, in conjunction with
projects like E-MELD, in the hopes that future generations will be able
to research and even recover lost languages.

According to the E-MELD website for its 1995 conference, the Electronic
Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data Project "is a five-year
project funded by the National Science Foundation with a dual
objective: to aid in the preservation of endangered languages data and
documentation and to aid in the development of the infrastructure
necessary for effective collaboration among electronic archives."

But these are pale consolation for those who are losing their families',
their tribes', their nations' cultural heritage and who are well aware
of the fact that it will pass into extinction when they are no longer
able to communicate. Whether by chauvinistic government policies or by
cultural seduction or diplomatic convenience, languages used by
influential states have historically pushed aside traditional tribal
languages.

While historically, English, which is used in a stunning variety of even
remote areas, has been charged with "killing" less agile traditional
languages, it has also been argued, as by Global Policy Forum, that its
ubiquity could help preserve minority languages, by allowing speakers to
use English to interact with "powerful neighbors", not having to cast
off their own native languages.

In some areas where minority languages are spoken but are not recognized
as official languages of the state, efforts have been made to popularize
English usage by factions supporting both the official language and
those resisting it in the name of their own local language. This only
shows the degree to which history has failed to teach us the most
effective method for "saving" a fading language.

It is often the case that the process of extinction is hurried by
parents not knowing enough to teach their own children their
grandparents' language. So in 1982, a community aboriginal
Maori-speakers founded the Kohanga Reo, or language nests. In a space
set aside to function as a community using the traditional Maori
language, young children are immersed, surrounded and taught by elderly
native speakers and paid teachers.

As the Kohanga Reo "nests" have spread, cultivating what Rebecca
Tuhus-Dubrow describes as "a cozy, playful atmosphere", Maori has seen
a fortunate resurgence. Whether the language nest format could be
transfered to other languages is not clear, though it would address a
common problem, where a language "skips a generation".

In Catalunya, in northeastern Spain, where fascists once persecuted
speakers of the regional language, state schools have been directed
increasingly toward instruction in this other of Spain's four official
languages. And Spain, as a nation whose most widely known language,
Castilian, is spoken by nearly half a billion people, has written into
its 1978 constitution a ban on descriminating on the basis of language
usage.

After 40 years of brutal persection and arbitrary detentions,
Catalunya's own romance language is now spoken by more people than
Swedish, meaning that, aside from its having to compete with both
Castilian (Spanish) and English for young people's attention, it's a
healthy language, recovered from what was intended to be an imposed
extinction.

In the year 2000, Whole Earth magazine went as far as to suggest that
90% of the more than 6,800 languages currently spoken could disappear
or become "moribund" by the year 2100. Top linguistic demographers tend
to suggest the numbers would be more like 50% going extinct by 2100, if
current trends are not reversed.

In 2003, the Independent, a UK newspaper, reported that of the 6,809
"living" languages, 90% had fewer than 100,000 speakers. At the time,
some 357 languages were known to have fewer than 50 speakers. Studies
showed that the rate of language extinction was already ahead of the
extremely rapid rate of animal species extinctions, and accelerating.