June 20, 2001. Copyright, 2001, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Many world languages facing extinction
By Elisabeth Ribbans

LONDON, June 20, Graphic News:  AROUND 6,800 languages are spoken throughout the world today Ð half of them in just eight countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, Indian, Mexico, Cameron, Australia and Brazil. By the turn of the next century, linguists believe that 90 percent of those languages could be lost. The Economist recently forecast that as many as 20 languages would vanish in 2001 alone.

Each time a language dies, the world loses more than a lexicon. Bound up in language may be precious information about a societyÕs culture, history and knowledge. In a recent study, Indigenous and Traditional Peoples of the World and Ecoregion Conservation, the World Wide Fund for Nature highlighted the imperilled link between language and the environment. It warned that ecological information garnered by indigenous people in their long history of managing the environment was embodied in language, yet in many places it was passed on to new generations only orally. The threat of language extinction to bio-diversity was exacerbated, said the report, by the fact that most at-risk languages were spoken by people in areas of high biological importance Ð many of which had yet to be documented.

The most threatened language today is Eyak, a language native to Alaska whose last-known speaker, Marie Smith, is 83 years old. In fact, half of all languages are now spoken by fewer than 2,500 people, according to the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, which monitors global trends. Aripaku, a tongue native to the Brazilian Amazon, is down to its last six speakers.

But language extinction is nothing new. In his 1999 book, A History of Language, Steven Roger Fischer points out that language may have suffered its first huge blow at the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago. Suddenly, after a period in which isolated pockets of primitive society had allowed an abundance of tongues to survive, large complex communities emerged, Òcreating ever greater units of economic and political power that destroyed human linguistic diversity.Ó Political and cultural oppression, which continues to threaten minority languages today, also has antique precedents. Hundreds of languages died, for example, as a result of the Spanish Conquest of South America in the 16th century. However, there is nothing to compare to the rate of linguistic haemorrhage over the past 40 years, during which time global trade and communications have promoted dominant languages Ð namely Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and, above all, English Ð at the expense of native ones.

It is estimated that well over 300 million people now speak English as their mother tongue, with a further billion people having some degree of fluency in the language. The rise of English to the status of world language causes anxiety even among linguistically secure nations such as France and Germany, because of the perceived threat posed by the Òlexical invasionÓ of English words. However, David Crystal, a leading expert on the English language, says adopting words from another language does not cause a language to die out. ÒEnglish has the position it has today not despite the languages it has borrowed from, but probably because of them.Ó Over the centuries, English has Òvacuumed upÓ words from 350 other languages and continues to do so. As Fischer observes: even as English becomes the dominant world language Ð losing its dialectical features and transforming into an Òamorphous International Standard EnglishÓ Ð local varieties of English continue to enrich their vocabularies from indigenous sources Ð Australian English from Aborigine, New Zealand English from Maori and South African English from Zulu and other native tongues.

Despite valiant efforts to rescue some minority languages, living on as adornments to English may be the best that many disappearing tongues can hope for.
/ENDS

Source: Associated Press