Ok, welcome to my first linguistics-related post for a little while now – @ParisianChic (AKA Eunice Moore) asked on Twitter:

@mr_billiam How does one stop an endangered language like Yanyuwa from becoming extinct? What made u become interested in this particularly?

SInce 140 characters is never going to be enough to answer either of those questions sufficiently I decided that this was a good point to stop and look at a few of the things driving me this year on my little endangered languages trek with Yanyuwa, even though it hasn’t properly begun yet.

Endangered languages

Prominent linguist Michael Krauss and a number of other linguists predicted, rather ominously, in 1992 that in this century over 90% of the world’s approximately 7000 languages could become extinct¹. This obviously means that in 100 years time – in an extreme case – only 700 languages out of the current 7000 could still be with us in less than 100 years.

What it also means is that a huge amount of collective knowledge – cultural knowledge, human knowledge – and a huge number of communities are going to be destroyed in the process. At the moment, over 80% of the people in the world speak one of the 83 biggest languages, whereas just 0.2% of people in the world speak 3,586 of the smallest languages². That difference means that most of the smallest languages in the world are sustained only by a few speakers – usually elderly speakers – and once they are gone, nobody will speak the language any more.

These languages often contain within them ideas and thought structures dating back millenia, and many of the languages are also scarcely if at all documented. Languages such as Yanyuwa who have only a few (7, as of this moment) speakers left don’t have the huge amount of text, recordings and grammatical information available to comprehensively understand what made the language tick once it is gone. This is where linguists come in.

What to do about endangered languages?

From what I’ve said above, it should be fairly clear that most of the languages – especially those most endangered – are on a downward slope that can’t really be reversed. When a language, such as Yanyuwa, has only a few speakers left, it is beyond the point at which a realistic language revitalization program can take place. Some languages, in less serious states of endangerment, can be restored as a first and growing language through the active involvement of speakers and community members. A good example of this is the Hawaiian language³, which has historically been severely endangered but is now becoming spoken by more and more people, is a language which can now be used as a sole language for education from prep through to postgraduate university if wanted.

Hawaiian the exception to the rule, though. Ultimately, most languages – especially those which are severely endangered, will not have the same number of speakers, the same amount of support or the facilities to stage a comeback and will eventually no longer be spoken. Most linguistic work on endangered languages now focuses on the documentation of these endangered languages before they cease to be spoken without any record for future generations.

Australia, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific regions pose specific problems for linguists and governments tackling language endangerment. These are all areas of extremely high linguistic diversity – and also areas of extremely high language endangerment⁴. Australia, for example, has about 230 languages spoken, but many of them like Yanyuwa have less than 10 elderly speakers left, and many are only beginning to be documented. The case in South East Asia – areas of extremely high language density such as Papua New Guinea with about 820 languages – is even worse, with many languages not documented at all, or even known to science. 820 is an estimate, but we don’t know for sure.

So, obviously, there is no clear answer to the question of what can be done to stop languages from becoming extinct. It will be one of the great cultural questions to be addressed by mankind in the next 100 years, as more and more languages become extinct.

Why am I here?

I think it’s probably obvious from what I’ve said above that I’m very interested and concerned by the plight of languages around the world. It is a tragedy that languages and the cultures, communities and all the other things they entail are being lost at an alarming rate. While nothing can be done to stop the loss, per se, I think it’s important to do what can be done to try and record as much of these languages as possible and assist speakers and community members in any way possible to that end.

I’ll write more about endangered languages as the year goes on, and admittedly my thesis topic doesn’t directly address these issues – I’m analysing existing language data from Yanyuwa in the context of its endangerment – but I thought I’d do a very broad overview of what language endangerment is all about. To me, anyway.

1. Hale, K., Krauss, L., Watahomigie, L., Yamamoto, C., Craig, L., Nasayesva, J., et al. (1992). Endangered Languages. Language , 1 (68), 1-43. [↩]
2. Harrison, K. (2007). When Languages Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 14. [↩]
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language [↩]
4. Harrison, K. (2007). When Languages Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 13-14. [↩]