Research Articles

Desperate straits for languages: how to survive

---

Abstract

The plight of the world’s endangered languages has certain properties that define it as a threat to humanity in our time. The problem is recognized as global: there is no continent without scores of languages that are unlikely to survive the current century. But evidently it looms largest where multilingualism — whether many languages in one area, or many in one mind — was once rife, but is now exceptional: in North and South America, in North Asia and in Australia. In these parts of the world, there are particularly many languages with tiny populations which place them very close to extinction. Nevertheless, the pendulum of language endangerment can swing back as well as forth. To illustrate how close all of us have actually come to language loss, consider two cases from the last millennium where languages were almost lost. They went through a century or two of extreme vulnerability: in that time, if others had made some different decisions, it is quite likely that today Portuguese would have become a minority language, or perhaps disappeared entirely. The same is true also for English. It is possible for a language’s prospects to change, and change radically.

Keywords: endangered languages, case study, Portuguese, English, language recovery, factors, isolation, political status, literary corpus, literacy, tradition, transmission, language documentation, solidarity

How to Cite:

Ostler, N., (2003) “Desperate straits for languages: how to survive”, Language Documentation and Description 1, 168-178. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd313