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| Languages in Danger of Getting Extinct |
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| Ernie C. Turla, president, Akademyang Kapampangan USA |
NATIVE TONGUES AROUND THE WORLD FALLING SILENT
by Darlene Superville of the Associated Press
The world is losing linguistic color. There are
6, 800 languages spoken around the world today,
but more than half of those languages could be lost
in this century, according to the Worldwatch Institute.
Languages disappear when another tongue is enforced by
governments. Many languages also die along with their
people during wars or natural disasters. But the greatest
threat today is simply disuse along with the global loss
of cultural diversity.
Facts on language:
Eight countries account for more than half of the world's
6, 800 languages.
- Papua New Guinea, 832 languages
- Indonesia, 731
- Nigeria, 515
- India, 400
- Mexico, Cameroon, Australia, almost 300 each
- Brazil, 234
More than 100 languages can be heard on the tiny archipelago
of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific Ocean near Australia. It is
home to some 190,000 people. India has 15 official languages,
more than any other nation.
The ten most common first languages and number of speakers:
-Mandarin Chinese, 885 million
-Spanish, 332 million
-English, 322 million
-Arabic, 220 million
-Bengali, 189 million
-Hindi, 182 million
-Portuguese, 170 million
-Russian, 170 million
-Japanese, 125 million
-German, 98 million
Ever hear someone speak Udihe, Eyak or Arikapu?
Odds are you never will. Among the world's 6, 800 languages,
50 to 90% could be extinct by the end of the century.
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, genocide, fatal disasters, government bans and the
adoption of more dominant languages, such as Chinese
and Russian, (and Tagalog, in the Philippines - e.t.) ,
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. Mary
Smith, 83, of Anchorage, Alaska, says she's the last
speaker of Eyak, a claim verified by linguists.
She doesn't like the distinction.
"It's horrible to be alone," Smith who grew up near Prince
William Sound speaking Eyak, said Monday. "I am the
last person that talks in our language - the last of the Eyaks"
It's becoming a struggle too, to find many who can say
"thank you" in the Navajo language of the Native American
tribe (ahehee), say "hello" in the Maori language in 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 diverse.
In January, a catastrophic earthquake in western India
killed an estimated 30,000 speakers of Kutchi, leaving
them to 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.
That languages die isn't new; thousands are thought 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 think 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 in 1898 the
then-independent island-country.
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 speak their
native tongue, up from fewer than 1,000 in
1983, said Luahiwa Manahoe, the organization's
spokeswoman.
"We just want Hawaiian back where she belongs,"
Namahoe explained. "If you can't speak it here,
where else would you be able to?"
Elsewhere, efforts are under way to revive Cornish,
the language of Cornwall, England, which is thought
to have died around 1777, as well as ancient Mayan
language 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, Maori and several languages native to Botswana.
(What about Kapampangan as well as other endangered
languages in the Philippines? Something should be done
to save them from the clutches of the dominant languages
there. An excellent remedy is to revive the method of teaching
in the elementary schools, using Kapampangan as the
medium of instruction like before. At present Kapampangan
has around 2 and a half million speakers. - Ernie Turla,
president, Akademyang Kapampangan USA)
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 Indian languages of Hindi, Marathi,
Guajarati and Kutchi.
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Kapampangan - A Language In Peril by Ernie Turla
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