Endangered language


An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead" or "extinct language". A dead language may still be studied through recordings or writings, but it is still considered dead or extinct once there are no more fluent speakers left. Although languages have always become extinct throughout human history, endangered languages are currently dying at an accelerated rate because of globalization, mass migration, cultural replacement, imperialism, neocolonialism and linguicide.
Language shift most commonly occurs when speakers switch to a language associated with social or economic power or one spoken more widely, leading to the gradual decline and eventual death of the endangered language. The process of language shift is often influenced by factors such as globalisation, economic authorities, and the perceived prestige of certain languages. The ultimate result is the loss of linguistic diversity and cultural heritage within affected communities. The general consensus is that between 6,000 and 7,000 languages are currently spoken. Some linguists estimate that between 50% and 90% of them will be severely endangered or dead by the year 2100. The 20 most common languages, each with more than 50 million speakers, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, but most languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people.
The first step towards language death is potential endangerment. This is when a language faces strong external pressure, but there are still communities of speakers who pass the language to their children. The second stage is endangerment. Once a language has reached the endangerment stage, there are only a few speakers left and children are, for the most part, not learning the language. The third stage of language extinction is seriously endangered. During this stage, a language is unlikely to survive another generation and will soon be extinct. The fourth stage is moribund, followed by the fifth stage extinction.
Many projects are under way aimed at preventing or slowing language loss by revitalizing endangered languages and promoting education and literacy in minority languages, often involving joint projects between language communities and linguists. Across the world, many countries have enacted specific legislation aimed at protecting and stabilizing the language of indigenous speech communities. Recognizing that most of the world's endangered languages are unlikely to be revitalized, many linguists are also working on documenting the thousands of languages of the world about which little or nothing is known.
Some widely spoken languages have endangered regional dialects, such as the varieties of English spoken on the American east coast, such as Eastern New England English.

Number of languages

The total number of contemporary languages in the world is not known, and it is not well defined what constitutes a separate language as opposed to a dialect. Estimates vary depending on the extent and means of the research undertaken, and the definition of a distinct language and the current state of knowledge of remote and isolated language communities. The number of known languages varies over time as some of them become extinct and others are newly discovered. An accurate number of languages in the world was not yet known until the use of universal, systematic surveys in the later half of the twentieth century. The majority of linguists in the early twentieth century refrained from making estimates. Before then, estimates were frequently the product of guesswork and very low.
One of the most active research agencies is SIL International, which maintains a database, Ethnologue, kept up to date by the contributions of linguists globally.
Ethnologue's 2005 count of languages in its database, excluding duplicates in different countries, was 6,912, of which 32.8% were in Asia, and 30.3% in Africa. This contemporary tally must be regarded as a variable number within a range. Areas with a particularly large number of languages that are nearing extinction include: Eastern Siberia, Central Siberia, Northern Australia, Central America, and the Northwest Pacific Plateau. Other hotspots are Oklahoma and the Southern Cone of South America.

Endangered sign languages

Almost all of the study of language endangerment has been with spoken languages. A UNESCO study of endangered languages does not mention sign languages. However, some sign languages are also endangered, such as Alipur Village Sign Language of India, Adamorobe Sign Language of Ghana, Ban Khor Sign Language of Thailand, and Plains Indian Sign Language. Many sign languages are used by small communities; small changes in their environment can lead to the endangerment and loss of their traditional sign language. Methods are being developed to assess the vitality of sign languages.

Defining and measuring endangerment

While there is no definite threshold for identifying a language as endangered, UNESCO's 2003 document entitled Language vitality and endangerment outlines nine factors for determining language vitality:
  1. Intergenerational language transmission
  2. Absolute number of speakers
  3. Proportion of speakers existing within the total population
  4. Language use within existing contexts and domains
  5. Response to language use in new domains and media
  6. Availability of materials for language education and literacy
  7. Government and institutional language policies
  8. Community attitudes toward their language
  9. Amount and quality of documentation
Many languages, for example some in Indonesia, have tens of thousands of speakers, but are endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are shifting to using the national language in place of local languages. In contrast, a language with only 500 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the primary language of a community, and is the first spoken language of all children in that community.
Asserting that "Language diversity is essential to the human heritage", UNESCO's Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages offers this definition of an endangered language: "... when its speakers cease to use it, use it in an increasingly reduced number of communicative domains, and cease to pass it on from one generation to the next. That is, there are no new speakers, adults or children."
UNESCO operates with four levels of language endangerment between "safe" and "extinct", based on intergenerational transfer: "vulnerable", "definitely endangered", "severely endangered", and "critically endangered". UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger categorises 2,473 languages by level of endangerment.
These categories are currently being reviewed by UNESCO to ensure they reflect the most up-to-date information on language vitality worldwide. Updates aim to provide an accurate and reliable representation of the current status of languages, supporting efforts in documentation, preservation, and revitalization.
Using an alternative scheme of classification, linguist Michael E. Krauss defines languages as "safe" if it is considered that children will probably be speaking them in 100 years; "endangered" if children will probably not be speaking them in 100 years and "moribund" if children are not speaking them now.
Many scholars have devised techniques for determining whether languages are endangered. One of the earliest is GIDS proposed by Joshua Fishman in 1991. In 2011 an entire issue of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development was devoted to the study of ethnolinguistic vitality, Vol. 32.2, 2011, with several authors presenting their own tools for measuring language vitality. A number of other published works on measuring language vitality have been published, prepared by authors with varying situations and applications in mind.

Causes

According to the Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, there are four main types of causes of language endangerment:
Causes that put the populations that speak the languages in physical danger, such as:
  1. War and genocide. Examples of this are the languages of the native population of Tasmania who died from diseases or were killed by European colonists, and many extinct and endangered languages of the Americas where indigenous peoples have been subjected to genocidal violence. The Miskito language in Nicaragua and the Mayan languages of Guatemala have been affected by civil war.
  2. Natural disasters, famine, disease. Any natural disaster severe enough to wipe out an entire population of native language speakers has the capability of endangering a language. An example of this is the languages spoken by the people of the Andaman Islands, who were seriously affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
Causes that prevent or discourage speakers from using a language, such as:
  1. Cultural, political, or economic marginalization creates a strong incentive for individuals to abandon their language in favor of a more prestigious language; one example of this is assimilatory education. This often happens when indigenous populations and ethnic groups who were once subject to colonization and/or earlier conquest, in order to achieve a higher social status, have a better chance to get employment and/or acceptance in a given social network only when they adopt the cultural and linguistic traits of other groups with enough power imbalance to culturally integrate them, through various means of ingroup and outgroup coercion ; examples of this kind of endangerment are the cases of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Scots in Great Britain; Irish in Ireland; Sardinian in Italy; the Ryukyuan languages and Ainu in Japan; and Chamorro in Guam. This is also the most common cause of language endangerment. Ever since the Indian government adopted Hindi as the official language of the union government, Hindi has taken over many languages in India. Other forms of cultural imperialism include religion and technology; religious groups may hold the belief that the use of a certain language is immoral or require its followers to speak one language that is the approved language of the religion. There are also cases where cultural hegemony may often arise not from an earlier history of domination or conquest, but simply from increasing contact with larger and more influential communities through better communications, compared with the relative isolation of past centuries.
  2. Political repression. This has often happened when nation-states, as they work to promote a single national culture, limit the opportunities for using minority languages in the public sphere, schools, the media, and elsewhere, sometimes even prohibiting them altogether. Sometimes ethnic groups are forcibly resettled, or children may be removed to be schooled away from home, or otherwise have their chances of cultural and linguistic continuity disrupted. This has happened in the case of many Native American, Louisiana French and Australian languages, as well as European and Asian minority languages such as Breton, Occitan, or Alsatian in France and Kurdish in Turkey.
  3. Urbanization. The movement of people into urban areas can force people to learn the language of their new environment. Eventually, later generations will lose the ability to speak their native language, leading to endangerment. Once urbanization takes place, new families who live there will be under pressure to speak the lingua franca of the city.
  4. Intermarriage can also cause language endangerment, as there will always be pressure to speak one language to each other. This may lead to children only speaking the more common language spoken between the married couple.
Often multiple of these causes act at the same time. Poverty, disease and disasters often affect minority groups disproportionately, for example causing the dispersal of speaker populations and decreased survival rates for those who stay behind.