Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.
Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.
New research, reported Tuesday, has identified the five regions of the world where languages are disappearing most rapidly. The “hot spots” of imminent language extinction are northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia and an area that includes Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All of the areas are occupied by aboriginal people speaking diverse languages, but in decreasing numbers.
The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, an organization for the documentation, revitalization and maintenance of languages at risk. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic magazine and at www.language hotspots.org.
At a teleconference Tuesday, K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said more than half of the languages have no written form and are “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” When they disappear, they leave behind no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.
Harrison, Gregory D.S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic Society, have traveled in recent years to many parts of the world, the beginning of what they expect to be a long-term series of projects to identify and record endangered languages.
In Australia, nearly all of whose 231 spoken aboriginal tongues are endangered, the researchers came upon such tiny language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, in the Northern Territory, and the three Yawuru speakers, in Western Australia.
In July, Anderson said, they met the sole living speaker of Amurdag, a language in the Northern Territory that had been declared extinct.
Forty American Indian languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many originally used by indigenous tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes forced to resettle on reservations there, mainly in Oklahoma.
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