Language Death
March 30, 2007
I am currently reading up on the loss of languages around the world, and it turns out we are losing them at quite a rate. It’s estimated that there are currently 6000 languages in the world today, but at the current rate, there will only be 600 by the end of the century. That’s a huge decrease in such a short period.
Of course, some of those languages are in a stronger position than others. There are 8 languages with over 100 million speakers (accounting for 2.4 million speakers). These are Mandarin, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese. If you look at the top 20 languages combined, you’ll find they account for 3.2 million speakers, which is over half of the world’s population.
At the other end of the scale, 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by only 4% of the people. In fact, a quarter of the worlds languages have less than 1000 speakers.
The key to language survival is the continuing inter-generational transmission of the language. Without this, they become moribund.
The question I’m going to be looking at is whether or now we should care about the loss or not. What do you think?
Two thoughts
- It is really the rate of change that we should worry about, not the inequality of the distribution (8 languages with more than 100m people, 25% of languages with less than 1000). It would be wierd if the distribution of language-speaker frequency *wasn’t* massively skewed. The critical thing is whether the small languages are disappearing at an alarming rate (which they are, as you say)
- Do we have any idea of the birth rate of languages? Or is it insignificantly small compared to the death rate?
Great picture btw!
To be or no to be, that’s a question.
by the way, i’m gonna get a new blog, so i deleted the old one.
good luck Steve.