Our planet's languages are dying - Worldview

MARATHI. Gujarati. Hindi. English. Kutchi. In Bombay, India, where I grew up, I used these languages every day. To get by on the streets, ask directions, and interact with people, I had to be able to speak Marathi. To go to a corner store to buy rice or tomatoes for dinner, I had to speak a little Gujarati, the language of a number of local shopkeepers. Kids in my school came from so many different linguistic backgrounds that we conversed either in English, the language of instruction, or Hindi, India's most widely spoken tongue.

Meanwhile, my grandparents spoke Kutchi, the language of our ancestors, who came from the deserts of western India. Despite their best efforts, I did anything I could to avoid responding to my grandparents in Kutchi. After all, they could converse fluently in many of Bombay's working languages, and I sensed from an early age that Kutchi was not useful in any obvious way. It couldn't help me to make friends, follow what was on TV, or get better grades. So, by default, I abandoned the language of my ancestors and chose instead to operate in the linguistic mainstream.

Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, and English are each spoken by at least 40,000,000 Indians. Kutchi, on the other hand, has perhaps 800,000 speakers--and that number is declining as more and more Kutchi-speaking young people switch to Gujarati or English. This decline makes the language increasingly vulnerable to a number of other pressures. In January, 2001, western India suffered a catastrophic earthquake, which had its epicenter in Kutch. As a result, Kutchi lost around 30,000 speakers.

India is a densely polyglot country. Estimates of the number of languages spoken there vary widely, depending on where one draws the line between language and dialect. A conservative reckoning would put the number of native Indian tongues at roughly 400, of which about 350 are rapidly losing speakers. The same is true for thousands of other languages all over the world. Most of those fading tongues don't come anywhere near Kutchi in terms of the number of speakers. Of the world's 6,800 extant languages, nearly half are now spoken by fewer than 2,500 people. At the current rate of decline, experts estimate that, by the end of this century, at least half of the world's languages will have disappeared--a linguistic extinction rate that works out to one language death, on average, every two weeks--and that's the low-end estimate. Some experts predict that the losses could run as high as 90%. Michael Krauss, a linguist at the Alaskan Native Language Center and an authority on global language loss, estimates that just 600 of the world's languages are "safe" from extinction, meaning they are still being learned by children.

It is believed that the human faculty for language arose at some point between 20,000 and 100,000 years ago. Many languages have come and gone since then, of course, but it is unlikely that the global assortment has ever before suffered so extensive and chronic a decline. This process seems to have originated in the 15th century, as the age of European expansion dawned. At least 15,000 languages were spoken at the beginning of that century. Since then, more than 4,000 tongues have disappeared as a result of wars, genocide, legal bans, and assimilation. Many anthropologists see the decline as analogous to biodiversity loss. In both cases, we are rapidly losing resources that took millennia to develop.

Today, the world's speech is increasingly homogenized. The 15 most common languages are currently on the lips of half the world's people, and the top 100 are used by 90% of humanity. European languages have profited disproportionately from this trend. Europe has a relatively low linguistic diversity--just four percent of the world's tongues originated there--yet half of the 10 most common languages are European. Of course, as a first language, the world's most common tongue is not European, but Asian. Mandarin Chinese is now spoken by nearly 900,000,000 people. However, English is the primary international medium of science, commerce, and popular culture. Most of the world's books, newspapers, and e-mall are written in English, currently spoken by more people as a second language (350,000,000) than as a native tongue (322,000,000). According to one estimate, English is utilized in some form by 1,600,000,000 people every day.

Most languages, in contrast, have a very limited distribution. Much of the planet's linguistic diversity is concentrated in just a few regions--all of them extremely rich in biodiversity as well. The Pacific region in particular has produced an amazing diversity of the spoken word. The island of New Guinea, which the nation of Papua New Guinea shares with the Indonesian state of Irian Jaya, has spawned some 1,100 tongues. New Guinea is home to a mere 0.1% of the world's people, yet those people speak perhaps one-sixth of the world's languages. Another 172 are spoken in the Philippines, and an astounding 110 can be heard on the tiny archipelago of Vanuatu, inhabited by fewer than 200,000 people. Overall, more than half of all languages occur in just eight countries: Papua New Guinea and Indonesia have 832 and 731, respectively; Nigeria, 515; India, about 400; Mexico, Cameroon, and Australia, just under 300 each; and Brazil, 234. (These figures come from the Ethnologue, a database published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Austin, Tex. Totals may include languages that have recently gone extinct.)