Here is a story that leaves me troubled, while at the same time also strikes me to be a natural part of the progression of things.

When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to. Native Australian Charlie Mungulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction. From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.

While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.

In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, many native languages are endangered in South America — Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia — as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

"When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday."

All that is true, but is it necessarily an unnatural occurrence? Throughout history, languages have become extinct as others, used by larger and more powerful neighbors, have overwhelmed them. Yes, it is a sort of cultural imperialism, but it is also the price of peoples being able to communicate with each other. This is especially true of languages like Amurdag. Other than from a scholarly interest, do we really benefit from making an effort to save them, when in contemporary society there are only a handful of speakers left?

Why the loss of such languages?

Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.

Modern communication and education. We live in an age of instantaneous electronic communication. A handful of languages have become the standards. Will we find, two centuries from now, that most folks communicate in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic? Won't the internet and other forms of mass media necessarily bring that about -- especially as educational systems prepare children for a future in which a global community needs knowledge of global languages?

Posted by: Greg at 09:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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