Globalization and other economic forces have combined to quash roughly a quarter of the world's languages. According to a new study by researchers at the University of Cambridge, in England, some 25 percent of the world's languages are nearing extinction as a result of rapid economic growth.
Linguists and anthropologists have been doing their best to keep tabs on which languages are fading, but this latest study looked at the economic factors driving change. By comparing linguistic datasets with GDP growth, Cambridge researchers were able to show the loss of languages is happening fastest in places were economic growth is most dramatic.
"As economies develop, one language often comes to dominate a nation's political and educational spheres," explained Cambridge researcher Tatsuya Amato. "People are forced to adopt the dominant language or risk being left out in the cold — economically and politically."
"Of course everyone has the right to choose the language they speak, but preserving dying language is important to maintaining human cultural diversity in an increasingly globalized world," Amato added.
Many of these languages only have a handful of fluent speakers left. One of them is the Wichita language of southern Plains Indians; it's now isolated to one fluent speaker in Oklahoma. Many of the threatened languages are spoken by native peoples.
But the work of Amato and his colleagues — which was detailed in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of Royal Society B — may help linguistic conservationists deploy preservation resources more systematically. The research suggests places like Australia and the north-western corners of the United States and Canada, as well pockets of the Himalayas, Brazil and Nepal, are all ripe for accelerating language loss.
Amato says one of the keys to preservation is bilingualism — and that might not be such a bad thing. Children who learn two languages have been shown to perform better in school and score higher on cognitive and social intelligence tests.
"As economies develop, there is increasing advantage in learning international languages such as English, but people can still speak their historically traditional languages," Amato said. "Encouraging those bilingualisms will be critical to preserving linguistic diversity."
