Languages face extinction in NT (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Languages face extinction in NT

By Dewi Cooke
September 19, 2007
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/languages-face-extinction-in-nt/2007/09/19/1189881599552.html

MORE languages are at risk of extinction in Northern Australia than any
other place in the world, researchers have found.

Linguists in the United States have ident ified five global "hot spots"
where languages are dead or dying, and the 153 indigenous languages spoken
in the far north of Australia are considered most at risk.

This has contributed to an extinction rate that outstrips that of mammals,
plants and birds with one language disappearing every two weeks, and at
least 20 per cent of the world's languages in imminent danger of becoming
extinct.

Such extinction translates into a loss of knowledge, researcher K. David
Harrison said.

"When we lose a language, we lose centuries of thinking about time, seasons,
sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths,
music, the unknown and the every day," he said.

Patrick McConvell, language research fellow at the Australian Institute of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, said the loss of indigenous
languages was devastating not only to Aboriginal communities but to wider
Australia.

"(Maintaining language) is of enormous value not only for indigenous
people's heritage but for all our heritage," he said. "And, of course,
we're struggling now with lots of problems and big interventions going on
with indigenous people, and at the same time there's not a lot of attention
paid to the fact that a lot of indigenous people think that maintaining
their language and culture is an important part of keeping their society
together."

In some areas, rarely-spoken indigenous languages have died with the last
speaker or been replaced by a more dominant language group. Linguists have
been working to document languages before they disappear entirely, a
process Dr McConvell said can take up to 12 months.

"The speed of loss of languages in Australia is the highest in the world,
and this has been noted by other people before. Obviously, without a major
effort they're not going to do much about that, but (linguists) are trying
to focus on what they can," he said.

Among the other hot spots identified by US researchers were a region of
Central America covering Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia; North
America including British Columbia and the US states of Washington, Oregon,
Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico; and Eastern Siberia.

Half the world's languages have disappeared in the past 500 years, and half
of the remainder are likely to vanish this century, Mr Harrison said.

Many of the languages are not translated easily into English. In the
endangered south Siberian language Todzhu, for example, the word "chary"
means "five-year-old male castrated reindeer that can be used for riding."

Harrison and Living Tongues director Gregory D.S. Anderson have identified
five language "hot spots" where the extinction rate is particularly high,
they said at a news conference sponsored by the National Geographic
Society, which is supporting their research.

One such area encompasses Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, where 40 languages
spoken by American Indians are at risk. Only five elderly members of the
Yuchi tribe, for example, are fluent in the Yuchi language, which might be
unrelated to any other language.

In Australia, researchers said there were three known speakers of the Magati
Ke langugage in the Northern Territory, and three Yawuru speakers. The team
found one elderly speaker of Amurdag, which previously had been declared
extinct, and he barely could recall the language spoken by his father.