Aboriginal languages face extinction, researchers report

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks.

Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.

New research, reported Tuesday, has identified the five regions of the world where languages are disappearing most rapidly. The "hot spots" of imminent language extinctions are northern Australia, central South America, North America's upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and an area that includes Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All of the areas are occupied by aboriginal people speaking diverse languages, but in decreasing numbers.

The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, an organization for the documentation, revitalization and maintenance of languages at risk. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic magazine and at www.languagehotspots.org.

At a teleconference with reporters on Tuesday, Dr. K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said that more than half of the languages have no written form and are "vulnerable to loss and being forgotten." When they disappear, they leave behind no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.

Harrison; Dr. Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic Society have traveled in recent years to many parts of the world, the beginning of what they expect to be a long-term series of projects to identify and record endangered languages.

The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists.

The individual projects, some extending three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children's readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families that are on their way out.