TOne of the great extinctions of the modern world has come to the spotlight this week as he launched a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to document disappearing Greek dialects. It is believed that nine languages disappear every year. Romaika, spoken by thousands of elderly people living in mountain villages near Turkey's Black Sea coast, diverged from modern Greek thousands of years ago. There is no written format.
For linguists, it is a “living bridge” to the ancient Greek world, and losing it would clearly be a blow. But some languages face even bigger problems, with 350 languages having fewer than 50 native speakers and 46 languages having only one native speaker. A collaboration between Australian and British institutions paints a colorful picture using a linguistic stripe chart devised to show the decline accelerating each decade from 1700 to today. The authors of this book predict that 50% to 90% of the world's 7,000 languages will disappear by the year 2150. Even now, half of the world's population speaks only 24 of these languages.
The United Nations is so concerned that it has declared an International Decade for Indigenous Languages. In this doomsday scenario, the kind of easy-to-use recording technology crowdsourced His Romeyka employs is a game-changer, especially since there could be His Romeyka speakers all over the world.
The history of language has always been linked to colonialism and political persecution, which not only oppress people but also disperse them. The Endangered Languages Alliance (ELA), which has tracked and mapped hundreds of languages in New York, reveals the paradoxical role that large cities play in helping even the smallest cities survive. Ta. One of the more surprising facts is that of the 700 survivors of the Szeke language, which originated in the mountain villages of Nepal, more than 150 found their way to his two apartments in Brooklyn.
Recording and archiving endangered languages is one thing, but even among linguists there is debate over whether languages should be preserved at all costs. Activist Ken Hale, for his part, famously argued that losing a language is “like dropping a bomb on the Louvre.” Another is Ioanna Citaridou, the Cambridge University professor behind the Romeika project, who believes it's up to the speaker to stop speaking.
However, social and economic priorities are changing, and it is not uncommon for minority languages to skip generations. Manx Island is one such island, which was listed by UNESCO from endangered to endangered after schoolchildren asked, “If our language went extinct, what language would we write in?” Downgraded. A strategy is now being developed to double the number of Manx speakers on the Isle of Man in 10 years.
In times of catastrophic environmental change, there are practical reasons to listen to the wisdom of language communities that may themselves be vanishingly small, but which together speak more than half of the world's surviving languages. From the Sami reindeer herders across the Arctic to the indigenous peoples of Australia, the way people express themselves encodes ancient ways of living in nature. Survival requires both will and method. Just by respecting their presence, linguists play an important role.