Dying Languages

What is the sound of a dying language? Not the chainsaws cutting through tropical forests that signal extinction for entire communities of tropical animals and plants. Not the screech of nets being pulled onto the deck of a trawler with the carcasses of some of the few remaining sea turtles. Not the snap of a ragged-toothed trap snaring a Florida panther. The sound of a language becoming extinct is simply silence. Family recipes that can no longer be read, bedtime stories that no child begs to hear again and again. No priests intoning the ancient chants. No mothers singing the lullabies they first heard as infants. Nothing to connect the descendants of a people who were once distinct from all others on the planet with their descendents, who blend in with the rest of the world.

Languages are today disappearing as a swift and terrible rate - killed off by a variety of factors from language shift to language change, from the attrition of the populations that once spoke these languages to what we might call linguacide - the intentional murder of a nation's speech. For some languages, the point of no return has already been reached, for others that point is quickly approaching (Dorian 1989; Trudgill 1995, 1998; Waas 1996). For some others, there is still hope.

There are thousands of languages spoken in the world today - between 6000 and 7000 by most accounts. This represents a substantial degree of linguistic diversity - but it also presents a falsely rosy picture because up to

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(http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/minorit3.html). Nearly an entire generation of Saami lost their language as the people shifted from traditional pastoral modes of life to more settled and agrarian ones (in part because of contamination of their reindeer herds by the accident at Chernobyl, in part through pressures that the Saami have faced from national governments such as that of Finland that do not want to have to work with the administrative complexities of a nomadic population). But the Saami have recently begun to consolidate their political power, often a vital step in the saving of a language. Nearly a whole generation is said to have lost the Saami language. According to the Finnish Statistics Centre, 1,716 persons were registered as having Saami as their mother tongue on 1 January 1998. The Saami Parliament, however, cites a figure of 2,500. About 330 speak Inari Saami and 200 Skolt Saami, in both cases mostly elderly people. These two small languages are threatened by extinction and "language nests" have been established to safeguard their survival (http://virtual.finland.fi/finfo/english/minorit3.html). The Saami are one of the few remaining indigenous peoples of Europe. But they are not a relict, not a wi

Category: Science - D