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Economic Growth Kills Minority Languages
[An Nahar] Economic prosperity is the worst enemy of minority languages, said researchers Wednesday who listed parts of Australia and North America as "hotspots" for extinction risk.We don't get to wear funny hats and embroidered jackets anymore either. Based on the same criteria used to determine the risk of extinction faced by animal and plant species, they concluded that about a quarter of the world's known 6,909 languages were threatened. Take your funny hat off to the last speakers of Vep and Athabaskan. "Languages are now rapidly being lost at a rate of extinction exceeding the well-known catastrophic loss of biodiversity," the U.S.-European research team wrote in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters. "And we'll all be the worse off for it. How do you say that in Iriquois?" "Small-population languages remaining in economically developed regions are seriously threatened by continued speaker declines." What do you think they speak in Brittany anymore? In Alaska, for example, there were only 24 active speakers by 2009 of the Athabaskan people's indigenous language, which children were no longer learning. Toldja so. There isn't that much international commerce carried out in Athabaskan, so it's rapidly going titzup. Ask any Vep. And the Wichita language of the Plains Indians, now based in Oklahoma, had only one fluent speaker by 2008. How do you know she was fluent? She coulda been lying and you'd never know, wouldja? In Australia, aboriginal languages like the recently-extinct Margu and almost extinct Rembarunga are "increasingly disappearing", the team wrote. Think of all the great literary works that disappear with it... "Economically developed regions, such as North America and Australia, have already experienced many language extinctions," they said. "Nevertheless, small-range and small-population languages still persist in hotspots within these regions. Those languages need immediate attention because of their high extinction risk." What are you gonna do? Require people to speak them? I would have had more respect for the authors of this study had they written it in Vep... Also at risk were developing parts of the world undergoing rapid economic growth, such as much of the tropics and the Himalayan region, said the team -- citing Brazil and Nepal. Posted by: Fred 2014-09-04 |
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