Re: [nukkad] For those interested in spoken langs..others ignore :)

[Harshal Chhaya <>]

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Asha's message reminded me of another report that I had come
across a couple of months back. It was titled 'Last Words: The 
Dying of Languages' and was published in the May/June 2001 
issue of the WorldWatch magazine. According to the author of 
that report, only 600 of the world's languages are considered 
"safe" from extinction because they are still being learned by 
children.

The report itself is available for a fee but here is a report
on that article. Very interesting (and slightly alarming) reading.



Languages Facing a Mass Extinction 


Ever hear someone speak Udihe, Eyak or Arikapu? Odds are you never will. Among 
the world's 6,800 languages, half to 90 percent could be extinct by the end of 
the century. 

One reason is that half of all languages are spoken by fewer than 2,500 people 
each, according to the Worldwatch Institute, a private organization that 
monitors global trends. 

Languages need at least 100,000 speakers to pass from generation to generation, 
says UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural 
Organization. 

War and genocide, fatal natural disasters, the adoption of more dominant 
languages such as Chinese and Russian, and government bans on language also 
contribute to their demise. 

"In some ways it's similar to what threatens species," said Payal Sampat, a 
Worldwatch researcher who wrote about the topic for the institute's May-June 
magazine. 

The outlook for Udihe, Eyak and Arikapu -- spoken in Siberia, Alaska and the 
Amazon jungle, respectively -- is particularly bleak. 

About 100 people speak Udihe, six speak Arikapu, and Eyak is down to one, 
Worldwatch says. Marie Smith, from Prince William Sound in Alaska, is thought 
to be the last speaker of Eyak, in which 'awa'ahdah means "thank you." 

It's becoming a struggle, too, to find many who can say "thank you" in the 
Navajo language of the American Indian tribe (ahehee), "hello" in the Maori 
language of New Zealand (kia ora), or rattle off the proud Cornish saying: "Me 
na vyn cows Sawsnak!" (I will not speak English!). 

The losses ripple far beyond the affected communities. When a language dies, 
linguists, anthropologists and others lose rich sources of material for their 
work documenting a people's history, finding out what they knew and tracking 
their movements from region to region. And the world, linguistically speaking, 
becomes less diverse. 

In January, a catastrophic earthquake in western India killed an estimated 
30,000 speakers of Kutchi, leaving about 770,000. Manx, from the Isle of Man in 
the Irish Sea, disappeared in 1974 with the death of its last speaker. In 1992, 
a Turkish farmer's passing marked the end of Ubykh, a language from the 
Caucasus region with the most consonants on record, 81. 

Eight countries account for more than half of all languages. They are, in 
order, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Mexico, Cameroon, Australia 
and Brazil. 

That languages die isn't new; thousands are believed to have disappeared 
already. "The distinguishing thing is it's happening at such an alarming rate 
right now," said Megan Crowhurst, chairwoman of the Linguistic Society of 
America's endangered languages committee. 

Linguists believe 3,400 to 6,120 languages could become extinct by 2100, a 
statistic grimmer than the widely used estimate of about one language death 
every two weeks. While a few languages, including Chinese, Greek and Hebrew, 
are more than 2,000 years old, others are coming back from the dead, so to 
speak. 

In 1983, Hawaiians created the 'Aha Punana Leo organization to reintroduce 
their native language throughout the state, including its public schools. The 
language nearly became extinct when the United States banned schools from 
teaching students in Hawaiian after annexing the then-independent country in 
1898. 'Aha Punana Leo, which means "language nest," opened Hawaiian-language 
immersion preschools in 1984, followed by secondary schools that produced their 
first graduates, taught entirely in Hawaiian, in 1999. Some 7,000 to 10,000 
Hawaiians currently speak their native tongue, up from fewer than 1,000 in 
1983, said Luahiwa Namahoe, the organization's spokeswoman. "We just want 
Hawaiian back where she belongs," Namahoe explained. "If you can't speak it 
here, where will you speak it?" 

Elsewhere, efforts are under way to revive Cornish, the language of Cornwall, 
England, that is believed to have died around 1777, as well as ancient Mayan 
languages in Mexico. Hebrew evolved in the last century from a written language 
into Israel's national tongue, spoken by 5 million people. Other initiatives 
aim to revive Welsh, Navajo, New Zealand's Maori and several languages native 
to Botswana. 

Governments can help by removing bans on languages, and children should be 
encouraged to speak other languages in addition to their native tongues, said 
Worldwatch's Sampat, who is fluent in French and Spanish and grew up speaking 
the Indian languages of Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and Kutchi. 

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