language offers some protection, do two extra languages offer more protection? If so, does the protection increase in direct proportion to the number of languages, or else more steeply or less steeply? For instance, if bilingual people get four years of protection from their one extra language, does a New Guinean, an Aboriginal Australian, a Vaupes River Indian, or a Scandinavian shopkeeper speaking five languages (four beyond her first language) still get just 4 years of protection, or does she get 4 ? 4 = 16 years of protection, or (if juggling four extra languages is much more than four times more taxing than juggling just one extra language) does she even get 50 years of protection? If you had the misfortune that your parents didn’t raise you as a crib bilingual, and that you didn’t learn a second language until you began high school at age 14, can you ever catch up to crib bilinguals in the benefits obtained? Both of these questions will be of theoretical interest to linguists, and of practical interest to parents wondering how best to raise their children. All of this suggests that bilingualism or multilingualism may bring big practical advantages to bilingual individuals, beyond the less practical advantages of a culturally enriched life, and regardless of whether language diversity is good or bad for the world as a whole.
Vanishing languages
The world’s 7,000 languages are enormously diverse in a wide range of respects. For instance, one day while I was surveying birds in jungle around Rotokas village in the mountains of the Pacific island of Bougainville, the villager guiding me and naming local birds for me in the Rotokas language suddenly exclaimed
As I talked with my guide, I gradually realized that the music of Bougainville’s mountains included not only the
But the music of their language is now disappearing from Bougainville’s mountains, and from the world. The Rotokas language is just 1 of 18 languages spoken on an island roughly three-quarters the size of the American state of Connecticut. At last count it was spoken by only 4,320 people, and that number is declining. With its vanishing, a 30,000-year experiment in human communication and cultural development will come to an end. That vanishing exemplifies the impending tragedy of the loss not just of the Rotokas language, but of most of the world’s other languages. Only now are linguists starting seriously to estimate the world rate of language loss, and to debate what to do about it. If the present rate of language disappearance continues, then by the year 2100 most of the world’s current languages will either already be extinct, or else will be moribund languages spoken only by old people and no longer being transmitted from parents to children.
Of course, language extinction isn’t a new phenomenon that began only 70 years ago. We know from ancient written records, and we infer from distributions of languages and peoples, that languages have been going extinct for thousands of years. From Roman authors and from scraps of writing on ancient monuments and coins in the territory of the former Roman Empire, we know that Latin replaced Celtic languages formerly spoken in France and Spain, and replaced Etruscan, Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, and other languages within Italy itself. Preserved ancient texts in Sumerian, Hurrian, and Hittite attest to now-vanished languages spoken several thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent. The spread of the Indo-European language family into western Europe, beginning within the last 9,000 years, eliminated all the original languages of Europe except for the Basque language of the Pyrenees. We infer that African Pygmies, Philippine and Indonesian hunter-gatherers, and ancient Japanese people spoke now-vanished languages replaced by Bantu languages, Austronesian languages, and the modern Japanese language respectively. Far more languages must have vanished without a trace.
Despite all that evidence for past extinctions of languages, modern language extinctions are different because of their greatly increased rate. Extinctions of the last 10,000 years left us with 7,000 languages today, but extinctions of the next century or so will leave us with only a few hundred. That record-high rate of language extinction is due to the homogenizing influences of the spreads of globalization and of state government over the whole world.
As an illustration of the fates of most languages, consider Alaska’s 20 native Inuit and Indian languages. The Eyak language, formerly spoken by a few hundred Indians on Alaska’s south coast, had declined by 1982 to two native speakers, Marie Smith Jones and her sister Sophie Borodkin (Plate 47). Their children speak only English. With Sophie’s death in 1992 at the age of 80, and Marie’s death in 2008 at the age of 93, the language world of the Eyak people reached its final silence. Seventeen other native Alaskan languages are moribund, in the sense that not a single child is learning them. Although they are still spoken by older people, they too will meet the fate of Eyak when the last of those speakers dies, and almost all of them have fewer than a thousand speakers each. That leaves only two native Alaskan languages still being learned by children and thus not yet doomed: Siberian Yupik, with 1,000 speakers, and Central Yupik, with a grand total of 10,000 speakers.
In monographs summarizing the current status of languages, one encounters the same types of phrases monotonously repeated. “Ubykh [that Turkish language with 80 consonants]…the last fully competent speaker, Tevfik Esen, of Haci Osman, died in Istanbul 10/92. A century ago there were 50,000 speakers in the Caucasus valleys east of the Black Sea.” “Cupeno [an Indian language of southern California]… nine speakers out of a total population of 150… all over 50 years old… nearly extinct.” “Yamana [an Indian language formerly spoken in southern Chile and Argentina]… three women speakers [in Chile], who are married to Spanish men and raised their children as Spanish speakers… extinct in Argentina.”
The degree of language endangerment varies around the world. The continent in most desperate straits linguistically is Aboriginal Australia, where originally about 250 languages were spoken, all with under 5,000 speakers. Today, half of those Australian languages are already extinct; most of the survivors have under 100 speakers; fewer than 20 are still being passed on to children; and at most a few are likely still to be spoken by the end of the 21st century. Nearly as desperate is the plight of the native languages of the Americas. Of the hundreds of former Native American languages of North America, one-third are already extinct, another third have only a few old speakers, and only two (Navajo and Yupik Eskimo) are still being used for broadcast on local radio stations—a sure sign of trouble in this world of mass communications. Among the thousand or so native languages originally spoken in Central and South America, the only one with a secure future is Guarani, which along with Spanish is the national language of Paraguay. The sole continent with hundreds of native languages not already in dire straits is Africa, where most surviving native languages have tens of thousands or even millions of speakers, and where populations of small sedentary farmers currently seem to being holding on to their languages.
How languages disappear
How do languages go extinct? Just as there are different ways of killing people—by a quick blow to the head, by slow strangulation, or by prolonged neglect—so too are there different ways of eradicating a language. The most direct way is to kill almost all of its speakers. That was how white Californians eliminated the language of the last “wild” Indian of the United States, a man named Ishi (Plate 29) belonging to the Yahi tribe of about 400 people, living near Mount Lassen. In a series of massacres between 1853 and 1870 after the California gold rush had brought hordes of European settlers into California, settlers killed most Yahi, leaving Ishi and his family, then Ishi alone, to survive in hiding until 1911. British colonists eliminated all the native languages of
