74 | P a g e
SECTION 3 Save Endangered Language "Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down
in history as the only science that presided obviously over the disappearance of 90
percent of the very field to which it is dedicated." -
Michael Krauss, “The World’s
Languages in Crisis
”.
A Ten years ago Michael Krauss sent a shudder through the discipline of linguistics with
his prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would cease to be
uttered within a century.
Unless scientists and community leaders directed a worldwide effort to stabilize the
decline of local languages, he warned, nine tenths of the linguistic diversity of humankind
would probably be doomed to extinction. Krauss’s prediction was little more than an
educated guess, but other respected linguists had been clanging out similar alarms.
Keneth L. Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in the same journal
issue that eight languages on which he had done fieldwork had since passed into
extinction. A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of the 90 surviving Aboriginal
languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups. The same was true for all but
20 of the 175 Native American languages spoken or remembered in the US, Krauss told
a congressional panel in 1992.
B Many experts in the field mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. To
start, there is scientific self-interest: some of the most basic questions in linguistics have
to do with the limits of human speech, which are far from fully explored. Many researchers
would like to know which structural elements of grammar and vocabulary
—if anyare truly
universal and probably therefore hardwired into the human brain. Other scientists try to
reconstruct ancient migration patterns by comparing borrowed words that appear in
otherwise unrelated languages. In each of these cases, the wider the portfolio of
languages you study, the more likely you are to get the right answers.
