Vanishing languages a 'tragedy'

In a world where more than 7,000 languages are spoken, it's hard to imagine everyone speaking the same tongue — or one of only four.

In the last 500 years, half of the world's languages have become extinct. It is predicted that in the next 100 years, nearly 50 percent of the world's current languages will follow suit, much like Kuku Thaypan, an Australian Aboriginal language in which only one man now is fluent.

"It's an unspeakable tragedy," said Lyle Campbell, a University of Utah linguistics professor and director of the U.'s Center for American Indian Languages. He said that of the 151 American Indian languages spoken in America today, only 20 of them are being taught to children, which means that much of the knowledge originated in those languages could be lost with the extinction of various tongues. In Utah, the Shoshone language has great possibility of becoming extinct, because only the senior population speaks it.

Another example of the importance of languages around the world involves a group of Indians in Mexico who have identified a grain found in the sea that requires no water or fertilizers to maintain. The food source could likely sustain people in the case of serious environmental problems, Campbell said.

"Without it, our chances of survival could be less," he said. "It could be important to humanity."

Researching, recording and keeping up to date on the decreasing number of spoken dialects are a priority for linguists around the globe. Fifty well-known endangered language researchers met at the U. in Salt Lake City on Thursday for a two-day workshop to develop the end-product of a comprehensive catalog and online searchable database.

"It's our responsibility as linguists to do what we can," Campbell said. "Linguistics is a study of human cognition, what makes the mind tick, click and work. If we lose 50 percent of the world's languages, as projected, we're losing 50 percent of human cognitive ability."

But that's what would happen if the many dialects with decreasing numbers of speakers weren't researched and remembered through the decades and centuries of human life, according to Anthony Aristar, a professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University. "While a language is still living, there's always hope that it can be saved for posterity," he said.

Having a central location to access information on all kinds of languages would likely help in directing funding to areas where languages are most seriously in danger of becoming extinct.

"If we don't do this work, there might come a time when all that is left is the cultures reflected by the 'big' languages, such as English, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic," Aristar said, adding that if there is enough of a language left, linguists can reconstruct relationships going back many thousands of years. The information can be paired with genetic and archaeological data to reveal where our ancestors were, how they lived and how they interacted with others.

The workshop at the U., sponsored in part by the University of Michigan, is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and is the first step in securing the information on endangered languages so that such reconstruction will be possible.

"Losing a language that has no relative languages existing is like losing a unique window to the world," Campbell said. "All of humanity stands to lose a lot."

e-mail: wleonard@desnews.com