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February 19, 2009, 01:20 PM ET
Endangered (Linguistic) Species
Manx, Aasax, Ubykh, Eyak: Once spoken in, respectively, the Isle of Man, Tanzania, Turkey, and Alaska, all four languages have died out in the last 35 years. Of the 6,000 or so languages still heard in the world, about 2,500 are at risk, and 199 have fewer than 10 speakers left, according to Unesco.
To bring attention to the plight of these endangered linguistic species, Unesco today unveiled an interactive online version of the latest edition of its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. (The print edition comes out next month.) The atlas draws on the work of more than 30 linguists, supervised by its editor in chief, Christopher Moseley of Australia.
Users of the atlas can search by country or area, language name, number of speakers, or vitality, which includes five categories: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered, and extinct. Each search takes you to a Google map with balloons that mark the home turf of each language; click on a balloon and you get a series of virtual notecards that give you that tongue’s name(s), latitude and longitude, number of speakers, and status. The Unesco team clearly hopes to add outside expertise to its work; users can record comments or corrections for each entry.
Is there good news? Glad you asked. In a news release, Unesco says that the atlas shows that the situation is not “universally alarming.” Papua New Guinea, for instance, has more than 800 languages—the most of any country—but “relatively few” endangered ones (88). Some languages declared extinct, including Cornish (Cornwall) and Sishee (New Caledonia), are the focus of revitalization projects.
Should we rush to blame global goliaths like English for what’s happening to the world’s linguistic diversity? Maybe not. “It would be naïve and oversimplifying to say that the big ex-colonial languages, English or French or Spanish, are the killers, and all smaller languages are the victims,” Mr. Moseley says in the news release. “It is not like that; there is a subtle interplay of forces, and this atlas will help ordinary people to understand those forces better.”
Multilinguists should also mark their calendars for Saturday, February 21, which is International Mother Language Day, established by Unesco in 2000 to celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity. —Jennifer Howard
Categories: Research
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