<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/05/the-guardian-view-on-endangered-languages-spoken-by-a-few-but-of-value-to-many>
"The launch of a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record a vanishing Greek
dialect drew attention back this week to one of the great extinctions of the
modern world: nine languages are believed to be disappearing every year.
Romeyka, which is spoken by an ageing population of a few thousand people in
the mountain villages near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, diverged from modern Greek
thousands of years ago. It has no written form.
For linguists, it is a “living bridge” to the ancient Hellenic world, the loss
of which would clearly be a blow. But some languages are in even bigger
trouble, with 350 that have fewer than 50 native speakers and 46 that have just
one. A collaboration between Australian and British institutions paints the
situation in stark colours, with a language stripes chart, devised to
illustrate the accelerating decline in each decade between 1700 and today. Its
authors predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s 7,000 languages will be
extinct by 2150. Even now, half of the people on the planet speak just 24 of
them.
The United Nations is so concerned that it has declared an International Decade
of Indigenous Languages. In this doomsday scenario, the sort of easy-to-use
recording technology employed by Crowdsourcing Romeyka is a gamechanger, not
least because there may turn out to be pockets of Romeyka speakers around the
world.
The history of languages has always been linked to colonialism and political
persecution, which scatter populations as well as suppressing them. The
paradoxical role of big cities in the survival of even the smallest of them is
revealed by the Endangered Languages Alliance (ELA), which has tracked down and
mapped hundreds of languages in New York. Among its more startling revelations
is that, of 700 surviving speakers of Seke, which originated in a cluster of
mountain villages in Nepal, more than 150 can be traced to two apartment
buildings in Brooklyn.
It is one thing to record and archive endangered languages but, even among
linguists themselves, there is a debate about whether they should be preserved
at all costs. On the one side was Ken Hale, an activist who famously argued
that losing any language was “like dropping a bomb on the Louvre”. On the other
is the Cambridge professor behind the Romeyka project, Ioanna Sitaridou, who
believes that it is up to speakers to decide whether to pass on their tongue."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
