Lost tongues

The latest issue of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) atlas on the status of the world's languages finds threats to a growing number as a handful of languages dominate an increasingly 'globalised' world but policy towards languages can have a major effect on survival prospects. In one extreme example of the threatened status of some languages, Unesco said that only one native speaker of Livonian remains on Earth, in Latvia. The Alaskan language Eyak died out last year when the last surviving speaker died. Those are just two of the nearly 2,500 languages out of 6,000 in the world that Unesco said are in danger of becoming extinct or have recently disappeared. The atlas enables searches according to several criteria and ranks the 2,500 endangered languages that are listed according to five different levels of threat; unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. In launching the new world atlas in Paris, linguists stressed that the list is not restricted to small or far-flung countries. They also sought to encourage immigrants to treasure their native languages. The atlas says that 200 languages have become extinct in the last three generations, and another 199 languages have fewer than 10 speakers left. More than a quarter of the 192 languages once spoken in the US have disappeared and another 71 are severely endangered, according to the atlas. Gros Ventre is spoken by fewer than ten people in northern Montana — all are elderly, and none is fully fluent. The last fully fluent speaker died in 1981. Menomonee, spoken in northeast Wisconsin, has just 35 speakers left. Among the languages that have recently become extinct, the atlas mentions Manx in the Compilation of the atlas was carried out by more than 30 linguists and shows that the loss of languages appears in every region and in very variable economic conditions. In sub-Saharan Africa, where approximately 2,000 languages are spoken (nearly one third of the world's total), it is likely that 10 per cent of them will disappear this century, the atlas concludes. It also shows that the US, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico are among the states with the greatest linguistic diversity and are also those with the greatest number of endangered languages. In Australia, 108 languages are in various degrees of danger. In France, 26 languages are endangered. But the situation is not universally alarming. Perhaps surprisingly, Papua …