Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (Third Edition)/Introduction

by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Introduction

Christopher Moseley

Nine years have passed since the previous edition of this Atlas was published. Nine years have also passed since the death of Professor Stephen Wurm of the Australian National University, who edited the first two editions. They marked the first attempt to plot on maps the locations of the languages that were most in danger of extinction within the foreseeable future. Both those editions highlighted particular areas of the world where linguistic diversity was being seriously depleted.

This project was born of a concern for the loss of diversity in this most basic human resource. It parallels the increasing concern over the loss of the world’s biological diversity, and for related reasons: the loss of isolated and self-sustaining habitats in the face of encroaching urbanization, economic concentration and the consequent homogenization of human cultures.

By its very nature, this Atlas tends to become outdated more rapidly than an ordinary language atlas would do. What is plotted on these maps are the most fragile linguistic balances – languages in danger of disappearing, even disappearing from one edition to the next.

The present edition is a logical progression from the second edition of 2001, which was divided into five parts: an introduction detailing developments in the study of endangered languages since the first edition; a description of the phenomenon of language endangerment and the death of languages; a short report on efforts by the scientific community to describe and record endangered languages; a fairly detailed overview of language endangerment in all major parts of the world; and a small atlas of some fourteen maps, some completely new and some others revised from the previous edition.

What the 2001 edition called ‘major parts of the world’ could be defined as those areas where the pressure on minority languages was the greatest, to put it in the simplest terms. This edition, however, expands the coverage to virtually the entire inhabited world, regardless of the density of endangered languages, while varying the scale of the maps to accommodate and acknowledge those areas where the linguistic diversity is greatest, or under the greatest threat.

The five years between the appearance of the first two editions were marked by an explosion in awareness of and research into language endangerment. This was due to several factors. My predecessor, Stephen Wurm, in the Introduction to the previous edition, pointed to a number of ventures that appeared alongside the first edition of this Atlas, including both publications and organizations in support of threatened languages. For a number of years previously, several international forums had been calling attention to the threat to the world’s pool of species diversity, and clearly this created a public mood that also encouraged an interest in preserving the diversity of human language and material culture. Thanks to the devotion of linguists in many countries, for the first time in human history it had become possible, at least in theory, to accurately catalogue and locate every language known all over the world. The compendium the Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Lewis, 2009), published by SIL International at regular intervals since 1951, is one of the most extensive efforts of this kind, and the Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages (Moseley, 2007) is one of the most recent. The only languages omitted were those belonging to the remaining handful of uncontacted peoples in the most inaccessible regions of the world.

Uncontacted languages are not the same as endangered languages, of course. But from the moment contact is established with the outside world, it must be assumed that the (previously) uncontacted group is not initiating the contact, but rather has been ‘discovered’, and that the discoverers represent a much larger speech community, probably an international one, and one which, at the very least, has sufficient infrastructure to organize such an expedition. One must also assume that the contacting side has an interest in either the speech community or the land it occupies. Commercial expansion and exploitation are frequently the motive behind such explorations and incursions.

Such first contacts are rare nowadays, but not unknown. There are also cases where the speakers deliberately repulse any attempt at contact, such as the speakers of Sentilese on Sentinel Island in the Andaman group in India, and certain Amazonian groups. In the twenty-first century, when a traditional way of life among hunter-gatherer peoples is a rarity, it is prized and championed by advocacy groups such as Survival International.

From the point of view of the linguistic researcher, this is a double-edged sword. The trained linguist must be sensitive and alert not only to linguistic factors so as to be able to accurately describe and transcribe the language (usually with the help of a bilingual intermediary) but also to non-linguistic and cultural factors, ignorance of which might alienate the group being studied and make cooperation impossible. Nowadays professional linguists, whether their aims are missionary or purely research-oriented, receive a thorough training in field methods. This in itself is an important factor in the future preservation of the world’s threatened languages.

What constitutes an endangered language, then? Linguists differ in their assessments of what exactly endangerment is, and the degrees of danger implied (see the writings of Joshua Fishman, 1991, 2000, a pioneer in this field of study, on the ways of assessing the viability of a language for revitalization), but the simplest definition that can be given is the following: a language is endangered if it is not being passed on to younger generations.

There are many complications, nuances and uncertainties associated with this definition. For example, a language may be thriving in the home environment, but not taught in the schools. In such cases, the language is not likely to be a written one, so that oral transmission is the norm. A language may be the vehicle of an economic underclass whose breadwinners are forced to go elsewhere to seek work – and when they do move into a larger speech community, they may not be able to retain everyday use of their own language. Circumstances vary from region to region, as will be seen from the discussions in this book, but a common thread running through those discussions is that endangered languages lack prestige – even in the eyes of their speakers; they lack economic power and independence; they lack a stable infrastructure; and in most cases they also lack literacy. That is why it is an important mission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to locate and publicize those languages, for the common awareness of humankind and the common good of its Member States.

Between the first and second editions of this Atlas, rapid strides were made in the coordinated study of language endangerment on a worldwide basis. Work on severely endangered languages in various parts of the world was carried out under a contract between the Intangible Cultural Heritage Section of UNESCO and the Permanent International Committee of Linguists (CIPL), enabled by a series of grants. Grants have also been provided for language documentation and rescue projects by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen; the Volkswagen Stiftung in Germany; the British-based Foundation for Endangered Languages; the Endangered Languages Fund in the United States of America; and the Languages of the Pacific Rim Project directed from Kyoto, Japan. The funding of research in the field has been placed on a much firmer footing since the establishment in 2002 of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

The revival of recently or even long-extinct languages is becoming a topical issue in many parts of the world, with the descendants of the last speakers clamouring for materials on their ancestral languages in order to gain an insight into how they sounded and functioned, and to relearn them at least in part so that they can use words and phrases as symbols of their reawakened identity. In Australia, for example, several dying or extinct languages have been revived and already have several dozen speakers, with more and more members of the respective ethnic communities learning their ancestral tongues.

Nations in which a major world language of colonial expansion is the dominant one, but which harbour small languages whose territory is shrinking, have often found it hard to come to terms with their indigenous heritage, and have not devoted sufficient attention to the field of safeguarding language. This is true not only of Australia, Canada and the United States, where English has swept all before it, but also of Lusophone Brazil and the Spanish-speaking world generally. That is one reason why this international volume fills such a pressing need: there is an obvious benefit in comparing the situations of loss of diversity and taking steps to redress the balance.

The history of mapping the world’s languages is almost as recent as that of the awareness of language endangerment – indeed, they go hand in hand. Not only does this edition of the Atlas provide a more complete coverage of the world’s surface than the previous editions, but the maps have been prepared in a completely different way. For the first time, this Atlas is being made available in both print and online versions, and the contributors have plotted the data interactively, making use of an interface developed by UNESCO and based on the Google Maps platform. The online edition of the Atlas similarly relies on this widely available and familiar platform to present all the data included in the print edition and much more.

Some of the maps have been updated from the previous edition; others are entirely new. Likewise, many of the contributors have been involved with the project since its inception, while others (especially those working on entirely new maps) have been specially commissioned for this edition. The format of the Atlas remains much the same, however: a text covering the general issues of language endangerment in each of the regions into which the maps are divided, followed by a set of maps on which languages are plotted using a colour-coded system showing the degree of endangerment. The markers are of uniform size: it would be impossible to clearly represent tiny speech communities within a vast area inhabited by majority languages. The online version shows, at the click of a mouse on the marker, the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of a language as well as a wealth of other information, and permits interactive contributions from the world’s linguists, census-takers and, most importantly, language communities.

Since the process of language attrition and extinction is a slow one, usually occurring over several generations, the Atlas has had to be somewhat arbitrary in its choice of which languages to exclude. Our aim is to raise the alarm for languages that are, as the title states, in danger. We take this mandate to mean all languages that are known to be in decline towards a foreseeable point of extinction – where the mechanisms are not in place to ensure their transmission to future generations – a decline that is predictable, but not of course inevitable.

The terminology of the degrees of endangerment has changed slightly since the first and second editions of this Atlas. Professor Wurm had established the practice of naming the five gradations as: vulnerable languages, where decreasing numbers of children are being taught the language; endangered languages, meaning that the youngest speakers are young adults; seriously endangered languages, where the youngest speakers have already passed middle age; critically endangered languages, which have only a few elderly speakers remaining; and extinct languages, marked in the previous editions with a black cross where they were last known to be spoken. Of course, the world is littered with extinct languages, and those included here are only those that have died recently, within the past couple of generations. In practice this means: since an awareness of their plight and imminent extinction was recorded. All trace of these languages has, in some cases, been wiped out for ever.

Following a two-year period of research by an ad hoc team of linguists commissioned by UNESCO, a document was published under the title Language Vitality and Endangerment (UNESCO, 2003). It established six degrees of endangerment that ‘may be distinguished with regard to intergenerational transmission’:

Safe (5): The language is spoken by all generations. The intergenerational transmission of the language is uninterrupted. [Thus such languages are not indicated in this Atlas.]

Stable yet threatened (5-): The language is spoken in most contexts by all generations with unbroken intergenerational transmission, yet multilingualism in the native language and one or more dominant language(s) has usurped certain important communication contexts. Note that such multilingualism alone is not necessarily a threat to languages.

Vulnerable (4): Most, but not all, children or families of a particular community speak their parental language as their first language, but this may be restricted to specific social domains (such as the home, where children interact with their parents and grandparents).

Definitely endangered (3): The language is no longer being learned as the mother tongue by children in the home. The youngest speakers are thus of the parental generation. At this stage, parents may still speak their language to their children, but their children do not typically respond in the language.

Severely endangered (2): The language is spoken only by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may still understand the language, they typically do not speak it to their children, or among themselves.

Critically endangered (1): The youngest speakers are in the great-grandparental generation, and the language is not used for everyday interactions. These older people often remember only part of the language but do not use it on a regular basis, since there are few people left to speak with.

Extinct (0): There is no one who can speak or remember the language.

For this edition, these are the definitions that have been adopted, and we have decided to represent languages in the last five categories: vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct.

It is a sign of the vigour of language revitalization efforts in various parts of the world that, in the course of preparing this Atlas, our team has met with objections to the term 'extinct' to refer to languages that have lost their last first-language speakers within living memory of present generations, according to our objective criteria. Our term has caused offence among those who are successfully revitalizing languages with only a handful of speakers, and even reviving the use of languages that had once been thought to be beyond saving. This gives us new hope, and we are pleased to acknowledge that the bald term 'extinct' does not reflect the true situation for some languages. These are the languages whose use and transmission have been interrupted for a generation or more. Previous editions of this Atlas had not had to consider revitalization movements, but since the last edition, in many places, they have gained strength and second-language speakers. Such languages, which might now be classified as 'critically endangered', 'vulnerable' or some other term within our terminology, will be identified as being in the process of revitalization.

Lastly, a word should be added about an all-important factor in the transmission of language: literacy. It would have been desirable in this Atlas to indicate on the maps whether each marked language possesses a written form. But this is not easy or straightforward. First, the speakers may possess literacy, but not in their own tongue – rather, in one of greater prestige and a longer written tradition. Second, the ‘written form’ may have been devised by outside linguists for transcription purposes, rather than for the creation of a body of written work, or a means of ordinary communication, by the speakers. Third, a written tradition in the language may have died out before the spoken form, and it may have been unstable and not in general use. With so many variables, it is not possible to present this information in graphically coded form. Literacy, however, figures prominently in the discussions by the regional editors in the different chapters of this volume.

■ ■Acknowledgements

The team of regional editors and their assistant contributors prepared this vast project over several months and working to a tight schedule; inevitably, the work involved constant consultation. The project was ably managed at UNESCO by my colleagues in the Intangible Cultural Heritage Section, to whom I as General Editor am indebted for much wise guidance. The named authors of the regional chapters have collaborated wonderfully well, and at any time of the day or night, somewhere in the world, they were working away, teasing out apparently intractable problems and inconsistencies and keeping me abreast of their progress.

They in turn have been greatly helped by a number of contributors, among whom I should particularly like to mention Gustavo Solis Fonseca, Tulio Rojas Curieux, Denny Moore and Bruna Franchetto, who have all made significant contributions to our knowledge of the language situation in South America. In Central America, too, a team of helpers worked on the project; they are named in the appropriate chapter. Of the regional editors, Tapani Salminen deserves special praise for his vigilance in spotting inconsistencies and lacunae between regions, and in helping to solve methodological and terminological issues. We have all learned a great deal from each other.