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
