Endangered language
The ultimate result is the loss of linguistic diversity and cultural heritage within affected communities.
[6] Across the world, many countries have enacted specific legislation aimed at protecting and stabilizing the language of indigenous speech communities.
An accurate number of languages in the world was not yet known until the use of universal, systematic surveys in the later half of the twentieth century.
[8] One of the most active research agencies is SIL International, which maintains a database, Ethnologue, kept up to date by the contributions of linguists globally.
[9] Ethnologue's 2005 count of languages in its database, excluding duplicates in different countries, was 6,912, of which 32.8% (2,269) were in Asia, and 30.3% (2,092) in Africa.
Areas with a particularly large number of languages that are nearing extinction include: Eastern Siberia,[citation needed] Central Siberia, Northern Australia, Central America, and the Northwest Pacific Plateau.
One of the earliest is GIDS (Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) proposed by Joshua Fishman in 1991.
[19] In 2011 an entire issue of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development was devoted to the study of ethnolinguistic vitality, Vol.
Poverty, disease and disasters often affect minority groups disproportionately, for example causing the dispersal of speaker populations and decreased survival rates for those who stay behind.
Scholars distinguish between several types of marginalization: Economic dominance negatively affects minority languages when poverty leads people to migrate towards the cities or to other countries, thus dispersing the speakers.
Cultural dominance occurs when literature and higher education is only accessible in the majority language.
Examples include songs, myths, poetry, local remedies, ecological and geological knowledge, as well as language behaviors that are not easily translated.
This may in turn affect the sense of identity of the individual and the community as a whole, producing a weakened social cohesion as their values and traditions are replaced with new ones.
[citation needed] Language can also be considered as scientific knowledge in topics such as medicine, philosophy, botany, and more.
For example, gradually losing grammatical or phonological complexities that are not found in the dominant language.
[40][41] Generally the accelerated pace of language endangerment is considered to be a problem by linguists and by the speakers.
They also consider it a scientific problem, because language loss on the scale currently taking place will mean that future linguists will only have access to a fraction of the world's linguistic diversity, therefore their picture of what human language is—and can be—will be limited.
[51] Linguists, members of endangered language communities, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and international organizations such as UNESCO and the European Union are actively working to save and stabilize endangered languages.
[55] Another option is "post-vernacular maintenance": the teaching of some words and concepts of the lost language, rather than revival proper.
