One Language Disappears Every Fourteen Days
 

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...adlines-nation

One of the world's 7,000 distinct languages disappears every 14 days, an extinction rate exceeding that of birds, mammals or plants, researchers said Tuesday.

At least 20% of the world's languages are in imminent danger of becoming extinct as their last speakers die off, compared with about 18% of mammals, 8% of plants and 5% of birds.

The extinction of a language translates into a loss of knowledge, said K. David Harrison, associate director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and a linguist at Swarthmore College.

"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 everyday," he said.

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

Many of the languages are not easily translated into English. In the endangered south Siberian language Todzhu, for example, the word "chary" means "2-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 supports their research.

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

The top hot spot is northern Australia, where 153 languages spoken by Aborigines are at risk. There are currently only three known speakers of Magati Ke in the Northern Territory and three Yawuru speakers. The team found one elderly speaker of Amurdag -- which had previously been declared extinct -- and he could barely recall the language spoken by his father.

Other hot spots include central South America, parts of the Pacific Northwest and eastern Siberia. All the areas are similar in that they were colonized with indigenous languages giving way to a colonial language either voluntarily or through coercion. A map of the hot spots is at www.languagehotspots.org.

The Native American languages in Oklahoma are giving way to English, Anderson said. That process has already taken place on the East Coast, which was colonized earlier. Virtually all indigenous languages have disappeared there.

Researchers from the Living Tongues Institute are visiting these locales and using digital audio and video equipment to record the last speakers of the most endangered tongues. "In many cases, these are the first and only digital recordings of the languages," Anderson said.

In as few as seven to 10 days, they can record enough information to prevent the complete loss of a language, he said.

survival of the fittest

Social Darwinism.

Isn't it natural?

Small groups of people spread across the world clump together to form bigger groups of people and bigger groups of people go to 1 language to communicate better.

american is the best and only langjuage. haha

Progress totally sucks.

languages dont really matter that much anyway

Unless a language is necessary to retain in order to interpret large bodies of literature (Latin, for example) or is in common use now, there's really no reason we have to retain languages. The beauty of languages is fine and all but the primary purpose of language is communication. If a language does more to hinder communication than encourage it, it should be forgotten.

But also the colonial coerced loss of languages suck. So did all the horrendous diseases that killed so many. Colonization was a bad idea, we all know this. This is just more bad effects from something that we all by now know was wrong.

i wish i lived off the land like an original indian. i would love that

One Language Disappears Every Fourteen Days

the horror

I think what is more horrible is the slow loss of the English language we are having in the US.

In 500 years everyone is going to be idiotic slang.

scary indeed.

look ma, we made the papers!



I wonder HOW the languages are going extinct so fast. are people murderin' injuns or are they just getting too drunk to talk?

DISCUSS (and pass the FIREWATER).

In the future people will communicate only via macro cats.

Welcome to the future.

fuck languages. if everyopne speaks the same language we can communicate without the omnipresent jingoism.

and knowledghe is not lost. that is a load of shit. what is lost is a culture.

nice red box Cochise, but without a cat in the picture I have no idea what yr trying to say to me!!!

Son of a bitch.

Cultural imperialism at work? I read recently that 2/3rds of the world speaks a second language, or at least a lingua franca. Those who contribute to this board from non-English speaking nations are included in this.

Anyone read the Whorf/ Sapir hypothesis? I got very excited about that when I was in college. It's not what it purports to be, but I do think in a great many cases concepts are certainly limited by the language in which they're expressed. Those of you who've come across Heidegger or Hegel, regardless of your opinions on them, will probably have struggled with some of the language. The most satisfactory answer with a word like geist from a German means whatever you think it means within the context of the statement.

Tangent: Is it the strength of the stories that ensures the omni-presence of Grecian myth? I say no, it's the power of the written language, the reification of a culture in words. See also the Vedas, Upinishads, the tragic histories of Lao Tsu, Mo Tsu and the spread of Indian philosophy to East Asia.

Does tradition, cultural history, cultural memory die if it's not written down? Well, yes, if all those who spread their history cease to be able to speak. Language is, faceless nobodies of the internet, empowerment, is it not? If the genocide of the Jews (to pick probably the best known contemporary genocide) were successful, would the Old Testament be called only that? If the English were successful in their aims, there would be no Welsh music. The history of Africa is the history of language destruction. For every tribal language there is 20 lost, I've read that before. What exactly is the history of Africa is we can't speak, even pidgen-style, to those people who are historical Africa?

This matter is something important, whether you care or not, faceless internet nobodies.

Sapir Whorff hypothesis. This may be of interest. Obviously, I'd be better off posting a link to Davey Crystal or Derrida or Lacan or any of the stucturalists, but I'll let you do your own fishing.

I hope the next language is french.

french is dying

it will all be repaced by english because english has not yet become static, and it can absorb words from any and all languages and make them it's own.

No Rob, no they don't. What a strange and ill-informed post you just made. Still, it is the internet.

huh? that was not me, man.

I took the liberty of paraphrasing you, hope you don't mind.

why [paraphrase? I said english, not american. english is spoken by more people every day, and it is the new international language of business (used to be french) and it DOES absorb any words from any language. this is all true man. half the words in the english language are lifted straight from french, german, spanish, chinese, whatever...
who said anything about rules and standards?

thank gawd somebody speaks a language that I can understand!

the rest of what I assume are clicks and grunts just come across as square boxes on my screen (my browser does not support pygmy).

:(

French, as a language, is far from dying. French falls into the category of languages which, thanks to cultural imperialism/ imperialism proper, is pretty secure in its position. If you know French French culture, there is no way they would give up their beautiful language, or at least, no way they'd switch to English. The various points of contact with French imperialism (large slews of Africa, mostly) are unlikely to abandon one imposed language in favour of another, not without (yet more) bloodshed which, thankfully, is currently out of vogue (the regimes the west imposed have done a fine job of letting African countries kill themselves).

It's the same with German. There's no point reverting to English. You're right insofar as English is the language of trade, and, latterly, the language of the internet. Before anyone hops in to say that other language exists on the internet - yes, thanks, I am aware of that. English is the dominant language of the internet, and is the dominant language of international trade.

The point isn't about languages that are secure in their status. French may not have the fluidity of input that English has, but French is far from some ossified museum piece - the main distinction is that the OED (or Websters for the USA) is an independent, academic enterprise. The dictionary of France is (or possibly was - I haven't read about this this century) controlled by the government. A word, in France, doesn't require the legitimation of the dictionary to be used and understood by its speakers. No word requires official legitimation to be considered an 'orthodox' word of its language. It just so happens that the OED is a descriptive and analytical measure of English-users; the French dictionary is slightly more towards being prescriptive, but this is by no means the same prescriptive as the one that is neccessary for dead languages like coptic or heiroglyphics.

I'd like to talk more about re-constructive languages like Hebrew, but I don't really know enough, unfortunately.