The World’s Vanishing Languages

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  09.26.07 | 1:38 PM ET

imageOne of the wonders of traveling is encountering all kinds of languages, especially ancient tribal tongues that have endured the ravages of colonization and globalization. But researchers at the Enduring Voices Project say indigenous languages are dying at an alarming rate of one every two weeks. That means that at least half half of the 7,000 languages spoken today could disappear in 20 years, John Noble Wilford reports in the New York Times.

“Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker,” Wilford writes. “Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.”

Languages are most quickly dying out in northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, Oklahoma and the southwestern United States.

Scholars from the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages have teamed up with National Geographic to save the roughly 3,500 endangered languages. They have chronicled their efforts on National Geographic’s Web site and at languagehotspots.com.

Related on World Hum:
* The Universal Language of Karaoke

Photo by malias via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

Tags: News and Briefs

Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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