http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i5Ct1a1hlSWClmrPt2j8TcNYgawQ

Researchers Say Many Languages Are Dying

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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."

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he
estimated.

That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the
language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no
text of any kind, he said.

Harrison is associate director of the Living Tongues Institute based in
Salem, Ore. He and institute director Gregory D.S. Anderson analyzed the
top regions for disappearing languages.

Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its
language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he
explained, realizing that other more widely spoken languages are more
useful.

The key to getting a language revitalized, he said, is getting a new
generation of speakers. He said the institute worked with local communities
and tries to help by developing teaching materials and by recording the
endangered language.

Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80
percent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages
account for just 0.2 percent of the world's people. Languages are more
endangered than plant and animal species, he said.

The hot spots listed at Tuesday's briefing:

_ Northern Australia, 153 languages. The researchers said aboriginal
Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages, in part
because aboriginal groups splintered during conflicts with white settlers.
Researchers have documented such small language communities as the three
known speakers of Magati Ke, the three Yawuru speakers and the lone speaker
of Amurdag.

_ Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and
Bolivia — 113 languages. The area has extremely high diversity, very little
documentation and several immediate threats. Small and socially less-valued
indigenous languages are being knocked out by Spanish or more dominant
indigenous languages in most of the region, and by Portuguese in Brazil.

_ Northwest Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and the
states of Washington and Oregon in the U.S., 54 languages. Every language
in the American part of this hotspot is endangered or moribund, meaning the
youngest speaker is over age 60. An extremely endangered language, with
just one speaker, is Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on
the Siletz reservation in Oregon.

_ Eastern Siberian Russia, China, Japan — 23 languages. Government policies
in the region have forced speakers of minority languages to use the
national and regional languages and, as a result, some have only a few
elderly speakers.

_ Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico — 40 languages. Oklahoma has one of the
highest densities of indigenous languages in the United States. A moribund
language of the area is Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language
in the world. As of 2005, only five elderly members of the Yuchi tribe were
fluent.

The research is funded by the Australian government, U.S. National Science
Foundation, National Geographic Society and grants from foundations.