Endangered languages

Did you know that nearly 80 percent of the world's population speaks only one percent of its languages, according to National Geographic?

One of the purposes for the National Language Service Corps is to recruit volunteers who speak the less-common languages in the United States. While our goal is not language preservation, I'm noticing that among language-oriented Tweeps (a contraction of "Twitter" and the slang "peeps" for people, thus: people who use Twitter) that we follow, the topic of endangered languages pops up. Endangered in the sense that there are few speakers of these languages left, and their numbers dwindling.

When we lose a language, we lose contact with the culture that expressed itself with that language. We lose a way of thinking. We lose that culture's wisdom ... "The wisdom of humanity is coded in language," says Lyle Campbell, director of the University of Utah's Center for American Indian Languages (CAIL) and professor of linguistics. "Once a language dies, the knowledge dies with it. Take for example medicinal plants. A tree bark may prevent cancer, AIDS, etc., but the name of the tree (and the associated knowledge) typically is lost when the language becomes extinct -- a loss to all humanity." (quoted from Science Daily)

Languages are disappearing completely as the remaining survivors of small language communities die. It's nothing new ... In the last 500 years, half of the world’s languages have become extinct. But now languages are dying at an even faster rate. Last month, the BBC reported predictions that half of the remaining 7,000 languages will be gone by 2100. Ethnologue lists 473 of today's language that it categorizes as already near extinction, including 76 in the United States. It also lists 65 other languages in the United States which are now extinct. This map highlights five "language hotspots" - areas in the world with high number of languages at risk of extinction.

Even though this is not a matter that gets the attention of mainstream media, when I googled "endangered lanugages" this morning, the search listed 499,000 links; "extinct languages" brought up 194,000 links.

Linguists are treating the issue as significant and serious. This month, the University of Utah's Center for American Indian Languages is hosting a workshop on the topic. And efforts are underway to preserve languages ... including those by Cambridge University to create a digital archive of languages, National Geographic to "document endangered languages and prevent language extinction", the Australian government to save aboriginal languages and the University of Chicago to study how, against the odds, the Greenlandic language is surviving and actually strengthening.