Being concerned with environmental extinction is important but there is another rapid extinction rate that is going largely unnoticed by many. political leaders bother less with this than environmental changes which is insane. there is about 5 000 living languages in the world today. each of them can be a precious treasure as language is not just a form of communication, it tells a story in itself and has experience with it. It reflects ways of perceiving and organizing social life, ways of living. Every language has its own purpose and effect on society.
Language death involves rectifying the thought and wing-cutting of our creative power. Still, it is happening rapidly with disturbing indifference. Now it is nothing new that languages die out and are forgotten. In human history, many languages have disappeared without leaving any trace. Many of them we never know about.
How many languages - and where?
Language death has already led to major linguistic alignment in the world. The five languagesmost people use - Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish and Russian - are native languages to 45% of us. As many as 95% of the earth uses only 100 of the 5000 existing languages. None of the 4900 languages used by the remaining 5% of today's people can be said to have a secure future. Many of them are disappearing right now; many more are at risk of dying out first. An UNESCO expert group estimates that more than half of the world's languages are directly threatened with death at the moment.
What does language death look like at this moment and in our immediate past? In Europe, several languages have died out in recent times, such as Cornish, Manic, Livonian and Dalmatian, and dozens of current languages are in a vulnerable situation: all the Sami languages, Eastern and Northern Frisian, Irish, Gaelic, Breton, Basque, Ladino, Romani, Yiddish and many others. We must not forget that there are far more languages in Europe than the official national languages. Only in the EU area before the 1995 enlargement is there more than 50 minority languages without official status, and they are the mother tongue of every six EU citizens. In this context, it is worth mentioning, although far less dramatic than the total language death, that a number of languages die out in areas where they have been minority languages for hundreds of years: German in France and Italy, Catalan in France, French in Italy, Turkish in Bulgaria and Greece, Greek in Albania, Bulgaria and Turkey, etc.
Worse, it is on the American continent. There were about 1,000 languages at the end of the 16th century. 300 of them are gone now, and of the remaining 700, approx. 680 in the danger zone; only 17 have more than 100,000 users. In the United States alone, around 50 languages have been eradicated since the arrival of Europeans. Throughout North America, there are still about 150 native languages; with few exceptions, they are all in imminent danger of disappearing over the next generation.
In Africa, too, many languages are at risk of extinction. It is most worrying, however, in the Pacific. About 25% of the world's languages are found there. In Australia alone, 50 of the at least 200 different languages found there when Europeans arrived are extinct, and another 100 are dying at the moment. About 40 Polynesian and 50 Micronesian languages are also seriously believed. The sudden change in culture in the region is not least threatening the approx. 700 languages in Papua New Guinea and the more than 800 languages on the islands of Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Fiji.
Why does language die out?
Why does language die out? In part, language death is related to the death of those who use the language. It can be about direct genocide: In Brazil alone, for example, about 80 different Native American people were exterminated in the Amazon area between 1900 and 1957. This is how things are happening. In the past, it was more common for language communities to die as a result of epidemics, famine and natural disasters.
Wurm, Stephen A. 1993. The Red Book of Languages in Danger of Disappearing. [Utdrag fra ibid.: UNESCO Programme: The Intangible Cultural Heritage. Paris: UNESCO Headquarters.]
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