Language Death

Stephen Cox

SLTC Newsletter, January 2009

Language, in either its written or spoken form, is the raw material for our research. So it is a shock to realise that a large proportion of the world’s languages are under threat of extinction. Estimates vary, but one contends that 90% of the more than 6 000 languages spoken in the world today could become moribund or extinct by 2100 [1]. 20 to 40 percent of languages are estimated to be already moribund, and only 5 to l0 percent are "safe" in the sense of being widely spoken or having official status. Another survey [2] compared the threat of extinction of languages with that of birds, and found that languages were considerably more threatened: there have already been more recorded language extinctions, and there are substantially more rare languages than rare bird species. This might seem a fanciful comparison, but interestingly, the conditions for languages and bird species to flourish appear to be similar. Once the effect of different land area sizes has been taken into account, languages, birds and mammals are all more diverse in low-latitude countries, in countries with large areas of forest, and in mountainous countries. Factors that we might expect to be correlated with number of languages, such as GDP per person or numbers of televisions per 1000 people (as an indicator of national and global communication) are, in fact, uncorrelated.

In 2004, Abrams and Strogatz proposed a simple and elegant mathematical model of how one language might decline at the expense of the other in a bilingual community [3]. They assumed that the two languages compete for speakers and hence there is a certain probability of switching from one to the other. The model accurately predicts the number of speakers of each language over time in a number of bilingual communities. Ominously, it also predicts only two stable points: all speakers speak either one language or the other. The authors point out that successful bilingual communities do exist, but until now, they have been split monolingual populations without significant interactions. However, the evidence from e.g. Welsh and Quebec French is that policies to encourage the minority language can arrest decline once mixing of the communities takes place.

Are we aiding or hindering the demise of languages with our technology? On the one hand, commercialisation of language and speech technology will tend to favour popular languages, which have bigger markets, and hence possibly increase their dominance. But tools created by our activity are excellent resources (analysis technology, teaching and learning technology, translation technology etc.) for these languages to regain speakers and to become active again, as activities such as the EuroBABEL project in Europe (promoting research on under-described endangered languages) and the E-MELD project in the USA (aiding the preservation of data and documentation of endangered languages) are showing.

[1] Krauss, M. E. (1992). The World's Languages in Crisis. Language 68(1).4-10.
[2] Sutherland, W.J. (2003). Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species. Nature 423, 276-279
[3] Abrams, D.M. and Strogatz, S.H. (2003). "Modelling the dynamics of language death," Nature 424, 900.