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.
