http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0221-01.htm
Published on Thursday,
February 21, 2002 by OneWorld/UK
Last Word Looms for Half the World's Languages
by Daniel Nelson
Half the world's 6,000 languages are under threat of extinction,
a new edition of the 'Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
of Disappearing' warned Thursday to mark International Mother
Language Day.
The death of languages
also spells the end of the culture
which gave rise to them, making them "a living heritage
we should cherish," said Koichiro Matsuura, director-general
of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO), commemorating the special day his
agency established three years ago.
UNESCO plans to set
up a monitoring system that will warn
when an endangered language--classed as those no longer spoken
by at least 30 percent of a community's children--is threatened
with extinction. The agency is urging countries to protect
languages as natural and cultural treasures.
A ceremony to mark
Mother Language Day at UNESCO's Paris
headquarters will feature a tribute to the former editor
of the Atlas, Professor Stephen Wurm, who died last October.
An Australian linguist of Hungarian origin, he spoke some
50 languages and pioneered the field study and analysis
of local tongues in Papua New Guinea, which is home to
832 languages, more than any other country.
The Washington-based
Worldwatch Institute (http://www.worldwatch.org/)
says Australia, Brazil, Cameroon, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria,
and Papua New Guinea account for more than half of all languages
in the world.
Australia is the country
with the largest number of vanished or
endangered languages, according to UNESCO. Until the 1970s
Australia's aboriginal population was forbidden from speaking
their 400 or so languages. Only about 25 are still commonly
spoken. One, Wanyi, is spoken by only two people.
Although languages
elsewhere in the world have been dying out
for 300 years, extinctions are now occurring at a dramatic
and steadily increasing pace, according to UNESCO.
Reasons given by the
Atlas include communities broken up
by outside groups who want to extract minerals, timber,
and oil from their homelands; and official sanctions against
the use of minority languages in schools, local authorities,
and the media.
The Atlas also points
out that languages spoken by minority
communities can be eroded as part of efforts by parents
to encourage their children to adapt to norms set by majority
cultures, especially as a means to get a job.
Kate Saunders, senior
news analyst with the London-based Tibet
Information Network, said that such economic pressures are
raising concerns about the survival of the Tibetan language,
regarded by many Tibetans as an important element of their
identity and culture.
"There is an almost
irreconcilable conflict between the need
for Tibetans to learn Chinese so that they are able to participate
more fully in the economic sphere, and maintenance of a distinct
Tibetan linguistic and cultural identity," says the Network.
Some 726 million people
use Mandarin Chinese as their mother
tongue, according to UNESCO, while 427 million are native
English speakers and 266 million are native Spanish speakers.
Almost 350 million speak other Chinese languages.
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OneWorld.net
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