“The world’s languages in crisis” (Krauss 1992), the great linguistic call to arms in the face of the looming language endangerment crisis, was first delivered in an Endangered Languages Symposium at the 1991 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Using the best available sources, he surveyed the global situation and estimated that only 10% of languages seem safe in the long term, up to 50% may already be moribund, and the remainder are in danger of becoming moribund by the end of this century. Twenty years later, better information is available. In this paper we use information from the latest edition of the Ethnologue (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013) to offer an update to the global statistics on language viability. Specifically the data for this study come from our work to estimate the level of every language on earth on the EGIDS or Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (Lewis & Simons 2010). Our finding is that at one extreme more than 75% of the languages that were in use in 1950 are now extinct or moribund in Australia, Canada, and the United States, but at the other extreme less than 10% of languages are extinct or moribund in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall we find that 19% of the world’s living languages are no longer being learned by children. We hypothesize that these radically different language endangerment outcomes in different parts of the world are explained by Mufwene’s (2002) observations concerning the effects of settlement colonization versus exploitation colonization on language ecologies. We also speculate that urbanization may have effects like settlement colonization and may thus pose the next great threat to minority languages.
2022. The Personal Pronouns of The Mehri Language as Spoken in Saudi Arabia. مجلة جامعة الشارقة للعلوم الانسانية والاجتماعية 14:2 ► pp. 23 ff.
Alexandrova, Nina Sh.
2023. The Disappearance of Languages and Natural Bilingualism. Polylinguality and Transcultural Practices 20:3 ► pp. 436 ff.
Azam-Ali, Sayed, Hayatullah Ahmadzai, Dhrupad Choudhury, Ee Von Goh, Ebrahim Jahanshiri, Tafadzwanashe Mabhaudhi, Alessandro Meschinelli, Albert Thembinkosi Modi, Nhamo Nhamo & Abidemi Olutayo
2023. Marginal Areas and Indigenous People Priorities for Research and Action. In Science and Innovations for Food Systems Transformation, ► pp. 261 ff.
Bensemann, Joshua, Jason Brown, Michael Witbrock & Vithya Yogarajan
2023. Is it Possible to Preserve a Language using only Data?. Cognitive Science 47:6
Bickford, J. Albert, M. Paul Lewis & Gary F. Simons
2015. Rating the vitality of sign languages. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 36:5 ► pp. 513 ff.
Cámara-Leret, Rodrigo & Jordi Bascompte
2021. Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118:24
2018. Jason Kandybowicz & Harold Torrence (eds.), Africa’s endangered languages: Documentary and theoretical approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. ix $+$ 503. Journal of Linguistics 54:3 ► pp. 666 ff.
Hansen, Cynthia
2020. Language Contact. In The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, ► pp. 1 ff.
Hildebrandt, Kristine A.
2018. Teaching about endangered languages in the undergraduate curriculum. Language and Linguistics Compass 12:7
Hirata-Edds, Tracy & Lizette Peter
2016. Multi-competence and endangered language revitalization. In The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Multi-Competence, ► pp. 321 ff.
Jany, Carmen
2018. The role of new technology and social media in reversing language loss. Speech, Language and Hearing 21:2 ► pp. 73 ff.
Kissau, Scott, Kristin Davin & Kristen Moore
2023. Preparing Cherokee Language Teachers: Lessons Learned From an Innovative Licensure Program. Journal of Teacher Education► pp. 002248712311654 ff.
Plimmer, Beryl, Liang He, Tariq Zaman, Kasun Karunanayaka, Alvin W. Yeo, Garen Jengan, Rachel Blagojevic & Ellen Yi-Luen Do
2015. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ► pp. 3493 ff.
Quinto-Pozos, David & Robert Adam
2015. Sign languages in contact. In Sociolinguistics and Deaf Communities, ► pp. 29 ff.
2017. Following in the footsteps of the wolf: connecting scholarly minds to ancestors in Indigenous language revitalization. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 13:1 ► pp. 11 ff.
Schwartz, Saul
2018. The Predicament of Language and Culture: Advocacy, Anthropology, and Dormant Language Communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 28:3 ► pp. 332 ff.
Westphal, Patrick, Claus Stadler, Jonathan Pool, Sebastian Hellmann, Steven Moran, Martin Brümmer & John McCrae
2015. Countering language attrition with PanLex and the Web of Data. Semantic Web 6:4 ► pp. 347 ff.
Zhang, Huiyu & Yao Ke
2023. Language policy in superdiverse Indonesia, 1st ed.. International Journal of Multilingualism 20:2 ► pp. 672 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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