World lingual losses mount
Associated PressThe most endangered areas are identified.
Published September 19, 2007
From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.
While an estimated 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.
Five hot spots where languages are most endangered were listed in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.
1. Northern Australia, 153 languages. The researchers said aboriginal Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages, in part because aboriginal groups splintered during conflicts with white settlers. Researchers have documented such small language communities as three known speakers of Magati Ke, three Yawuru speakers and a lone speaker of Amurdag.
2. Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia, 113 languages. The area has extremely high diversity, very little documentation and several immediate threats. Small and socially less-valued indigenous languages are being knocked out by Spanish or more dominant indigenous languages in most of the region, and by Portuguese in Brazil.
3. Northwest Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and the states of Washington and Oregon, 54 languages. Every language in the American part of this hot spot is endangered or moribund, meaning the youngest speaker is over age 60. An extremely endangered language, with just one speaker, is Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon.
4. Eastern Siberian Russia, China and Japan, 23 languages. Government policies in the region have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages and, as a result, some have only a few elderly speakers.
5. Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, 40 languages. Oklahoma has one of the highest densities of indigenous languages in the United States. A moribund language of the area is Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language in the world. As of 2005, only five elderly members of the Yuchi tribe were fluent.