Endangered Languages Must Be Saved
Endangered languages: what is to be done, and why?
The threat to linguistic resources is now recognized as a worldwide crisis. Language death is what happens when the last speaker of a particular language dies, or when a language community ceases to exist. It is an extinction that is happening on a massive scale and with astonishing speed. According to Krauss (1992a), as many as half of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken on earth are "moribund"; spoken only by adults who no longer teach them to the next generation. An additional 40 percent soon may be threatened because the number of children learning them is declining. In other words, 90 percent of existing languages today are likely to die within the next century. That leaves only about 600 languages, 10 percent of the world's total that remain relatively secure—for now.
How languages die...One obvious way is that its speakers can perish through disease or genocide. This was the fate, for example, of most languages spoken by the Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, who disappeared within a generation of their first contact with Christopher Columbus. The other way is through ‘language suicide’ when people decide to abandon their native tongue out of self-interest (to enjoy the superior opportunities open to English speakers for example). As Denison (1977) states "multilingual parents no longer consider it necessary or worthwhile for the future of their children to communicate with them in a low-prestige language, and children are no longer motivated to acquire a language which is not useful for education or future employment" (p. 21)
The third way is ‘language murder’. Take the example of Native American languages, which were targeted by the U.S. government in a campaign of linguistic genocide. In 1868, a federal commission concluded: "In the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble ... Schools should be established, which children should be required to attend; their barbarous
The threat to linguistic resources is now recognized as a worldwide crisis. Language death is what happens when the last speaker of a particular language dies, or when a language community ceases to exist. It is an extinction that is happening on a massive scale and with astonishing speed. According to Krauss (1992a), as many as half of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken on earth are "moribund"; spoken only by adults who no longer teach them to the next generation. An additional 40 percent soon may be threatened because the number of children learning them is declining. In other words, 90 percent of existing languages today are likely to die within the next century. That leaves only about 600 languages, 10 percent of the world's total that remain relatively secure—for now.
How languages die...One obvious way is that its speakers can perish through disease or genocide. This was the fate, for example, of most languages spoken by the Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, who disappeared within a generation of their first contact with Christopher Columbus. The other way is through ‘language suicide’ when people decide to abandon their native tongue out of self-interest (to enjoy the superior opportunities open to English speakers for example). As Denison (1977) states "multilingual parents no longer consider it necessary or worthwhile for the future of their children to communicate with them in a low-prestige language, and children are no longer motivated to acquire a language which is not useful for education or future employment" (p. 21)
The third way is ‘language murder’. Take the example of Native American languages, which were targeted by the U.S. government in a campaign of linguistic genocide. In 1868, a federal commission concluded: "In the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble ... Schools should be established, which children should be required to attend; their barbarous