http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0515-05.htm
Published on Thursday,
May 15, 2003 by the lndependent/UK
Alarm Raised on World's Disappearing Languages
by Steve Connor
The number of "living" languages spoken in the world
is dwindling
faster than the decline in the planet's wildlife, according to
a
new study.
A comparison of the
factors affecting the loss of languages and
the demise of wild animals has found that the world's 6,000-plus
tongues are facing the biggest risk of extinction.
"The threats to
birds and mammals are well known but it turns out
that languages are far more threatened," said Professor Bill
Sutherland, a population biologist at the University of
East Anglia in Norwich.
Linguists estimate
that there are 6,809 "living" languages
in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken
by fewer than 100,000 people, and some languages are even
rarer - 46 are known to have just one native speaker.
"There are 357 languages with under 50 speakers. Rare
languages are more likely to show evidence of decline
than commoner ones," Professor Sutherland said.
By applying the same
principles used to classify the risk
to birds and mammals, Professor Sutherland demonstrated that
languages were subject to similar forces of extinction.
In the study published
in Nature, Professor Sutherland found
that the factors that increased the diversity of animal
species - notably forest cover, tropical climates and mountainous
topography - were also those that influence the richness of local
languages. "Countries with large numbers of languages are
those
with the most forests, are nearer the tropics and with mountain
ranges. The same factors affect the number of bird species,"
he said.
Over the past 500 years,
about 4.5 per cent of the total number
of described languages have disappeared, compared with 1.3 per
cent of birds and 1.9 per cent of mammals. Colonization has
had the strongest influence. Of the 176 living languages spoken
by the tribes of North America, 52 have become extinct since
1600. Of the 235 languages spoken by the Aboriginal Australians,
31 have disappeared.
Professor Sutherland
said that when comparisons were made
to threatened animals, there was a substantially higher
proportion of languages that could be considered "critically
endangered", "endangered" or "vulnerable"
- the three
classifications used to describe the threat to birds
and mammals. "My extinction risk classification for
languages is conservative ... Even with this, it is clear
that the risks to languages exceed those to birds and
mammals," Professor Sutherland said.
A well-established
phenomenon that comes into play when
a species declines to small numbers is called the Allee
effect - for example when further breeding drops off
because animals have difficulty finding a mate. A similar
effect may also occur with rare languages. "People just
don't want to learn them because they know there are
so few others who can speak it," he said. The Leco language
of the Bolivian Andes, for instance, is spoken by about
20 people. The Cambap language of Cameroon in Central
Africa is used by just 30 native speakers.
Some languages are
important because they contain unique
characteristics. The Yeli Dnye tongue of the people
who live on Rossel Island, in Papua New Guinea, for example,
contains unusual sounds and a vocabulary that upsets the
universal terminology for describing colors.
Professor Sutherland
found that although mountains, forests
and the tropics were common factors behind the diversity
of animals and languages, both types of extinction did not
necessarily occur in the same regions of the world.
Between 200 and 250
languages are spoken by more than
a million people, with Chinese Mandarin, English and
Spanish being the three most popular tongues.
© 2003 Independent
Digital (UK) Ltd
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