http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/science/19language.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1
&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1190176478-velDSevCZ5e6BdXvixeabw

September 19, 2007

Languages Die, but Not Their Last Words

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say,
nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this
century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.

Some 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.

New research, reported yesterday, has found the five regions where
languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South
America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and
Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people
speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.

The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the
National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered
Languages. The findings are described in the October issue of National
Geographic and at languagehotspots.org.

In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an
associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half
the languages had no written form and were “vulnerable to loss and being
forgotten.” Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the
accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.

Beginning what is expected to be a long-term project to identify and record
endangered languages, Dr. Harrison has traveled to many parts of the world
with Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute, in
Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic
Society.

The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects,
interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language
and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three
to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing
grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The
research has concentrated on preserving entire language families.

In Australia, where nearly all the 231 spoken tongues are endangered, the
researchers came upon three known speakers of Magati Ke in the Northern
Territory, and three Yawuru speakers in Western Australia. In July, Dr.
Anderson said, they met the sole speaker of Amurdag, a language in the
Northern Territory that had been declared extinct.

“This is probably one language that cannot be brought back, but at least we
made a record of it,” Dr. Anderson said, noting that the Aborigine who
spoke it strained to recall words he had heard from his father, now dead.

Many of the 113 languages in the region from the Andes Mountains into the
Amazon basin are poorly known and are giving way to Spanish or Portuguese,
or in a few cases, a more dominant indigenous language. In this area, for
example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily
life, but also have a secret tongue mainly for preserving knowledge of
medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science.

“How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while
being spoken by very few, is a mystery,” Dr. Harrison said in a news
release.

The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous
languages in the Northwest Pacific plateau, a region including British
Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Only one person remains who knows Siletz
Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.

In eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced
speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages,
like Russian or Sakha.

Forty languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of
them originally used by Indian tribes and others introduced by Eastern
tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations, mainly in Oklahoma.
Several of the languages are moribund.

Another measure of the threat to many relatively unknown languages, Dr.
Harrison said, is that 83 languages with “global” influence are spoken and
written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face
extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds,
mammals, fish and plants.