FILE 12.

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language Endangerment and

language Death

12.6.1 Minority Language Status

Material in other files makes it clear that there are many, many languages around today.
Even with the difficulties involved in distinguishing languages from dialects (see File 10.1)
and even with our imperfect knowledge of the range of speech forms found in some parts
of the world (e.g., Papua New Guinea or various regions in South America), a figure .of some
7,000 languages is widely cited and generally accepted as a rough estimate of how many
languages there are in the world today. This number is in accord, for instance, with what is
known about global ethnic diversity (even if it draws on an overly simplistic equation of
language with ethnicity, which is a controversial issue) and with the array of nations, virtu-
ally all of which are home to many languages.
A basic observation about these 7,000 or so languages is that not all are equally robust
in terms of their number of speakers. In fact, the number of speakers differs greatly from
language to language: there are some languages with millions of speakers, some with thou-
sands, some with hundreds, some with tens, and some with just one. Moreover, the number
of languages with a small number of speakers is far greater than the number with millions
of speakers. In fact, a total of less than 10% of the known languages accounts for more than
90% of the world's speakers. It follows from these numbers that a good many, even most,
languages are minority languages within their larger societal context.
The fact that a given language may not just have a small number of speakers, but often
has a minority status compared to some other language or languages that it shares territory
with, is a key to understanding the phenomena of language endangerment and ultimate
language death; the death of a language is taken to occur when it no longer has any speak-
ers actively using it.
Speakers of minority languages, especially when they are an overt minority immedi-
ately and directly confronted by a dominant culture, face particular sorts of pressures that
often lead them to give up their language in favor of a language of the majority, or at least
of a politically, economically, and socially more dominant group. Among these pressures
are the following, some of which are also discussed in File 11.3:
• problems of access to mainstream economic opportunities (e.g., if jobs require skills in
the dominant language)
• potential for ridicule, overt discrimination, and prejudice for being different (e.g., being
forbidden by law or regulation to speak one's own language)
• lack of instruction in their native language (with the possibility that schools will force the
majority language on minority-language-speaking children)
• limited "scope" for using the language (what can be referred to as its "domains of usage")
There are, of course, some positive aspects to maintaining one's language even if it is a mi- ,
nority language. Among these benefits are:

504
 505

• potential to maintain one's culture and prevent a sense of rootlessness (to the extent that
aspects of the minority culture are tied up with language)
• enhanced pride and self-esteem
• a well-developed self-identity and group membership that allows access to a different cul-
ture (see File 10.5)
• cognitive advantages through bilingualism (e.g., added expressiveness, new perspectives
afforded by a different worldview, etc.) (see File 8.5).

12.6.2 From Minority Status to Endangerment

For many minority language speakers, the more concrete pressures of access to jobs and
stigmatization override the less tangible benefits, and as a result they move toward linguis-
tic assimilation with the more dominant language. In such cases, there is typically a three-
generational "drop-off," with the last fully fluent generation giving way as assimilation sets
in to a transitional generation, which in turn spawns a generation often more at home-
linguistically and culturally-with the dominant language than the traditional one. At that
point, especially if this scenario is replicated across all the pockets of speakers of the minor-
ity language, or if such minority communities are small to start with, the viability of the
minority language as a whole is threatened. In such a case, we talk of the language being
endangered, on its way to extinction, and, we might say, death.
This sort of scenario is occurring in all corners of the earth, with different dominant
languages and cultures being the "heavy," the "killer language," as it were. While many of
the European colonial languages, such as English in the United States, Spanish in much
of Latin America, or Portuguese in Brazil, have become the dominant language that threat-
ens the viability of indigenous languages in various areas, other languages play the same
role elsewhere, including Arabic in northern Africa, varieties of Chinese in parts of China,
Thai in northern Thailand, and so on.
Endangerment is really a locally determined phenomenon. For instance, Greek has
been a minority language of immigrants within the last century in the United States and
Australia but is increasingly losing ground to the more dominant English in each country.
However, in Greece itself, where Greek is the socially more powerful language, the Alba-
nian dialect known as Arvanitika is nearing extinction due to pressures on its speakers to
function in Greek. In fact, a few of the widespread "killer languages" ("serial killers," some
linguists have called them) are themselves threatened in some places. Spanish is giving
way to English in parts of the United States, and it is even the case that English is an endan-
gered language in the Bonin Islands, off of)apan, where despite being spoken by Westerners
for over 100 years, it is yielding to the local dominant language, Japanese. What cases like
these mean is that there is nothing inherent about a particular language itself that makes it
a dominant language, nothing intrinsic to English or Spanish, for instance. Rather, endan-
germent is determined by the particular social circumstances that guide the interaction
between two speech communities occupying rough ly the same geographical space but dif-
fering as to their population numbers and dominance relations as measured by utility in
the economic marketplace, cultural dominance, and the like. Languages can, of course, hap-
pily co-exist without one threatening the viability of the other. (See Files 12.1 and 12. 7 for
some discussion of the long-term, more or less peaceful coexistence of languages.)
This process of language loss through language endangerment and language death is
quite widespread today, to the point that many scholars are seriously worried about the
survival of the rich lingui stic diversity that the world has known for millennia, of the par-
ticular (and often unique) viewpoints on representing and structuring knowledge about
the world that different languages provide, and of the variety of linguistic structure offered
by the range of languages that currently ex ists. It is certainly the case that language endan-
506 Language Contact
....--·-·---·------·-----------·· ·-·------ ------------------------------··----- .. ·-----------·-···- --~-----------····----···--

germent and language death have taken place in the past; one need only see the many
names of tribes recorded in ancient histories, for example, that of the fifth-century BCE
Greek historian Herodotus, to get a sense of how many peoples were assimilated, linguisti-
cally and culturally, in times long past. But the pace at which language extinction is pro-
ceeding seems to have accelerated in recent decades, giving a sense of urgency to th e current
situation.
Many analysts talk about language death when there are no longer any flu ent speak-
ers. At such a point, there may welt be speakers with some command of the targeted lan-
guage but not full fluen cy; such speakers can be referred to as semi-speakers, though the
more chilling designation terminal speakers has also been used. Fluency in a language is a
scalar phenomenon, with different degrees possible, and in a language endangerment situ-
ation, one finds differing levels of competence with the language on the part of its remain-
ing speakers. Some might have very limited abilities and essentially just barely "pass" as
speakers by knowing a few formulaic phrases and appropriate utterances. If alt of the more
fluent speakers die off- they tend to be the elders in such communities-sometimes alt that
are left are some speakers who remember a few words and phrases but have no active com-
mand of the language. Wh en there are only such "rememberers," the language is effectively
dead, though "moribund" might be a fairer characterization.

12.6.3 Can Dying/Dead Languages Be Revived?

Some linguists prefer the term dormant language to dead or extinct language, their think-
ing being that under the right conditions, languages can be "reawakened" and revived.
Although the collective wilt that is needed to effect such a revival can be daunting and does
not happen often, there are some remarkable success stories to point to.
The revival of a form of Biblical Hebrew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuri es in
what has become the state of Israel is perhaps the most famous case, with modern Israeli
Hebrew being a testament to what dedication to such a linguistic cause can do. Although
the modern language differs somewhat from Biblical Hebrew, it has become a living lan-
guage (again) . Similarly, dedication is evident in the way that the indigenous New Zealand
language Maori has been staging a comeback, as the institution of te kohanga reo 'language
nests,' a language-immersion experience for young Maori children, seems to have been a
successful revival strategy thus far. And, in Ohio, the tireless efforts of one member of the
Miami Tribe, Daryl Baldwin, in learning the dormant Miami language as an adult, speaking
it with his children, and promoting its use in summer language camps, has created an
awareness of the language that would not have seemed possible even twenty years ago.
It must be admitted, however, that the road to renewed viability for any given endan-
gered language is not an easy one. The pressures on speakers referred to above can be over-
whelming, and one often finds that speakers "vote with their mouths," as it were, and
abandon their heritage language in favor of the locally dominant language.

12.6.4 What Happens to a Language as It Loses Speakers and Dies?

Typically, endangered languages show massive influx of vocabulary and even syntactic
structures from the dominant language, but such is not always the case. Languages can die
with their native lexicon and native grammatical structures more or less intact. Moreover,
borrowing, as seen in Files 12.1 and 12.2, is a phenomenon that even healthy and robust
languages engage in . Thus, it is hard to generalize about what a language will look like in
an endangered state, but vocabulary loss, loss of some phonological contrasts (e.g., semi-
speakers of Arvanitika generally do not distinguish between the trilled /r/ and the tap /r/
found in other healthier dialects), and the decline of native word orders or syntactic com-
 File 12.6 Language Endangerment and Language Death 507
----- . -------· - ·-·-------·-------·-·--·--·--·----· --·--·-- ----.--- ..•-·-··-- ··•-·--- ·-·--·· ---

binations are not at all uncommon in seriously threatened languages. Interestingly, new
elements can also enter the language at this point, often in the form of sounds from the
dominant language that come in with loanwords (as with the voiced velar fricative [y] found
in recent Greek loanwords into Arvanitika).

12.6.5 A Final Word (Or Two)

Two final points are worth making. First, even though the discussion above talks about
language endangerment and death, the same considerations apply just as readily at the
level of dialect. That is, there can be endangered dialects just as there are endangered lan-
guages. Some of the once-distinctive dialects of English heard on the Sea Islands on the
Atlantic coast of South Carolina and Georgia, for example, have been giving way to more
Standard English forms in recent years. Second, even with the loss of languages on a large
scale worldwide, there is some replenishing of the stock of the world's languages occurring
through ongoing and continual dialect differentiation as well as processes of creolization
(see File 12.4). Still, the creation of new languages seems not to be occurring at the same
rate as the loss of existing languages. This situation has led many linguists to action with
regard to the documentation of poorly described languages that may not survive many
more years and to revival efforts such as those described above.
Language Files
Materials for an Introduction to
language and Linguistics

Eleventh Edition

Editors
Vedrana Mihalicek
Christin Wilson

Department of Linguistics
The Ohio State University

I
The Ohi o State Uni versity Press
Columbus
 Copyright© 2011 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Language files : materials for an introduction to language and linguistics/ editors, Vedrana Mihalicek,
Christin Wilson.- llth ed.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8142-5179-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
/--. _J......l,l!! uistics. I. Mihalicek, Vedrana. II. Wilson, Christin.
( 1-)·-i :. Pl21!;,3855_3011
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2011005856

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