Wrestling With Oblivion: Endangered Languages

Languages are invaluable cultural storehouses, encoding and preserving the entire world view of a people. When a language dies, that information, which amounts to a complete human survival strategy, perishes, never to be regained. The loss of such crucial information is why linguists are so concerned by figures such as these:

• about four languages disappear in every two month period

• at that rate, half of the world's estimated 6000-odd existing languages will be gone a hundred years hence

• Over 95% of the world's current living languages have less than a million speakers today

• Twenty to fifty percent of the world's languages are no longer taught to any children

• Just nine very diverse countries, taken together, harbour more than half of the world's spoken languages

• Forty to seventy-five percent of the world's languages are considered endangered; only five to ten percent are considered entirely secure

Inasmuch as we can't even define what a language is, identifying "endangered" traditions is a bit subjective. But in the absence of scientific criteria, linguists have developed practical working guidelines. The most widely used is the A-B-C-D system, based on the age and fluency of remaining speakers. However, specific application of these categories remains equivocal, as the Endangered Language List attests. (The ELL is also a prime example of how valuable an Internet forum can be when properly patrolled.)

Others reject the entire notion that linguistic decay is bad. Better-educated scoffers claim that it's just evolution, that languages naturally disappear over time. Others appeal to political efficacy or old-fashioned bigotry, asserting that endangerment is proof of a language's "inferiority" (or the "superiority" of competitors.) But as linguist Michael Krauss points out, the benefits of preserving and promoting languages far outweigh the minor inconveniences that such policies imply. As to the position that language succession is natural, today's spectacular, unheard-of rate of extinction suggests that markedly unnatural mechanisms are afoot. In fact, scientists note that languages are most threatened in exactly the same places where biodiversity is in sharp decline. Wherever rural areas are bulldozed in the name of corporate profit, languages are also churned under.

Here in the Americas, dominated by majority cultures famous for scorning indigenous societies, languages are dropping like flies. Two hundred have vanished forever, and the extinctions are proceeding faster than ever. The struggle remains mostly a local one, undertaken by individual bands and sympathetic universities. Though all three of the non-endangered North American languages are Canadian, all the rest of Canada's three-hundred-odd languages are threatened. This is spite of the fact that some, such as Déne and Innu, command substantial territory. In Latin American nations the situation is as bad or worse, owing to rigid cultural values that place indigenous peoples even further beyond the limits of respectability than their northern counterparts.

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