Last week linguists once again sounded the alarm, trying to draw public attention to endangered languages. The formal occasion for this was a recently published book by David Harrison, ‘When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge’. According to the linguist, the fates of many languages are now intertwined with the lives of individuals: every two weeks the last speaker of an ancient and often unique language dies on the planet. With him, the language itself dies.
Harrison works as an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia and directs field research as part of the recently established Enduring Voices project under the auspices of National Geographic. The project’s goal is to preserve the endangered languages of the Earth as much as possible; in most cases, this is only possible on video and audio tapes. In addition, as part of the project, National Geographic journalists try to draw public attention to the problem, while scientists refine the boundaries of the distribution of various languages, especially endangered ones, and identify the most vulnerable regions.
Among the six regions with the highest level of threat to local languages, two are located in Russia – Central Siberia and the north of the Russian Far East. In the ranking of the most vulnerable, Russian territories took fourth and fifth places. First place went to Australia’s Northern Territory, where, according to scientists, 153 languages are endangered. Second is the region in the upper reaches of the Amazon and its tributaries on the eastern slopes of the Andes, where indigenous people live in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, and their native languages are gradually being replaced by Spanish and Portuguese. Third place went to the area inhabited by North American Indians in the region of the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Last place went to a region that includes dense Indian-populated areas in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
In the Far East, according to Harrison, the most threatened languages are Alyutor, Yukaghir, and Orok. All of them belong to the Altaic language family, although there is also a view that Orok is a member of a separate Tungusic family, and some believe it is a family in itself, as it is not related to others. American linguists estimate that fewer than fifty people currently speak Orok, all of them elderly (according to the last census, 327 residents of Siberia identified themselves as Oroks).
About a hundred people speak Yukaghir, whose camps are scattered in the upper reaches and near the mouth of the Kolyma River, and it is recognized as a whole language family (though there are northern and southern dialects). About 200 people remain as speakers of Alyutor, living on Chukotka and Kamchatka.
Further south, on Sakhalin and in the north of Khabarovsk Krai, live the Nivkhs, whose unique language is also endangered. The Nivkh language has 26 types of numerals, 19 of which are used for counting specific objects – for example, fishing boats or nets. Another six apply to specific types of objects, such as round or flat ones. Among these six, there is a special type of numeral denoting the number of pairs of paired objects. Finally, the 26th type of numeral is used for everything that does not fall into the previous 25 classes. There are now about five thousand Nivkhs, but most of them do not speak their native language.
In Central Siberia, the situation is no better. Here, Central Siberian Khanty, Ket, and Enets are endangered, and the greatest threat hangs over Tofalar and Southern Selkup, which are spoken by only a few dozen people. Harrison himself has extensively researched the Tofalar language. He gives the example of the word ‘chary’, which in Tofalar means ‘a castrated five-year-old tame and trained reindeer’, or ‘yugudur’ – ‘a two-year-old reindeer that has not been with its native herd for the last six months’.
According to Harrison, the cause of language extinction is the inability of traditional culture to withstand the onslaught of modern culture, which invades life through the television screen and radio. It invades in the ‘dominant’ language spoken by the majority of the country where the speakers of the ‘minor’ language live, be it Russian in Russia, English in Australia and the USA, or Spanish and Portuguese in most South American countries. In addition, National Geographic and its patronized public institute, the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, also blame the Russian government, which is forcibly Russifying small peoples with a traditional way of life. American researchers only mention the conquest of the Wild West and the ‘lost generation’ of Australian aborigines in the past tense.
Currently, 80% of the world’s population speaks 80 languages, and 70% speak only forty, the most common of which are Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, English, Russian, Portuguese, and Arabic. By 2100, these figures are unlikely to change, but the number of living languages will halve. And nothing seems able to stop it.
A language family is a group of several languages that are close in origin and close in degree of difference from other families to the degree of difference of the historically distinguished Indo-European family from other families. About 240 language families are known; another 100 languages are considered so-called isolates – that is, languages that themselves constitute a language family that does not include any other known languages, even extinct ones. About a hundred languages remain unclassified.
The classification of languages and their families is controversial – it is difficult, for example, to draw a line between some dialects and separate languages when classifying them. Therefore, it is simplest to classify languages geographically.
Thus, on the territory of Eurasia, there are 21 language families and 4 isolates, 12 Eurasian languages are unclassified. In Africa and South-West Asia, 28 families, 10 isolates, and 10 unclassified languages are distinguished. In North and South America, speakers of languages from 42 and 55 families, 28 and 43 isolates, and 6 and 77 unclassified languages live, respectively. Australia and Oceania are the most "rich" in languages - there are about 100 families and 32 isolated languages. Alas, most of them are endangered.
Artyom TUNTSOV.
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