Languages In the World (59 page)

Today more than 90% of the word's languages have less than one million speakers, and 50% of the world's languages have less than 10,000 speakers. Without intervention to change course, not only will the languages of today's hotspots become extinct, but today's linguistic safe zones will become tomorrow's language hotspots.

However, the probability of a language's survival does not come down to the number of speakers alone. A language with 50,000 speakers is in one sense worse off than a language with twice as many speakers, but we cannot predict with complete certainty which language will disappear first. This depends – like so many language questions – on the sociohistorical conditions in which the language is embedded, including the forces supporting the maintenance of the language, and the pressures operating against it. A critical factor in language survival or death is perception, that is, how the speakers understand the value of their language. Thus, a language with 50,000 speakers may be more ‘healthy' than the language with twice as many speakers if the speakers perceive it to be worthy of transmission and actually do so.

Linguist Louis-Jean Calvet has devised a gravitational model of language to help us rethink language endangerment. In his view, the worldwide ‘galaxy of languages' is made up of a number of language constellations, each comprising a central language and a number of peripheral ones. Within a given constellation, the central language exerts a gravitational pull on the peripheral languages; speakers are either obligated to learn the central language (by law or through compulsory education) or seek to do so on their own volition. The peripheral languages are therefore linked to the central one through bilingual speakers. The central languages of different constellations may or may not be linked to one another by bilingual speakers but may be linked to a supracentral language. The supracentral languages may or may not be linked to one another through the speech of bilinguals, but will be linked to a hypercentral language, what Calvet calls “the keystone of the linguistic gravitational system” (2006:60).

Taken together, the world's languages constitute a complete gravitational system, and can be grouped into four distinct levels according to the weight of their gravitational pull:

• Level 4 (peripheral). The vast majority of the world's languages, some 4000–5000, comprise level 4. These are the so-called peripheral languages, which include all of the languages of the current language hotspots, and many others. Speakers of level 4 languages may be monolingual, bilingual in another peripheral language, or bilingual in a higher-status language.
  
• Level 3 (central). The peripheral languages in level 4 cohere around 100–200 central languages. In Africa, these languages include Wolof and Bambara, in South America, Quechua, and Czech and Armenian in Europe. First-language speakers of these languages tend also to be bilingual in a level 2 language.
  
• Level 2 (supercentral). The supercentral languages are the most widely spoken languages in the world today. They include Arabic, Chinese, French, Hindi, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili. Those who speak a supercentral language as their first language are unlikely to acquire either a central or peripheral language. They may be monolinguals in their first language, are very frequently bilinguals in another supercentral language, or may acquire the level 1 language.
  
• Level 1 (hypercentral). There is currently one language in this category, namely, English. Those speakers who have English as their only first language tend to be monolinguals.
  

Two observations about bilingualism characterize this system. First, although many speakers are native multilinguals in that they acquired two or more languages as children, those speakers who acquire a second language at school or as an adult will tend to acquire a language from the level immediately higher than their own. For example, in the case of the West African nation of Senegal, a child who speaks Diola (level 4) in the home may first acquire Wolof (level 3), the language of the largest ethnic group and the most spoken language in Senegal. When the child goes to school, she will be required to learn French (level 2), which she must speak with great facility if she is to study at a Senegalese university. Depending on her social status, profession, and other socio-economic opportunities, she may acquire English (level 1) later on. Our second observation is that bilingual acquisition within a given constellation is unidirectional. That is, a first-language speaker of Diola may well be motivated to learn Wolof, but it is extremely unlikely that a first-language speaker of Wolof will be motivated to learn Diola. It is even less likely that a French monolingual will learn Diola.

Over time, the gravitational pull of central, supercentral, and hypercentral languages shifts speakers from periphery to center. This movement alone does not pose a threat to the peripheral languages as such, since a peripheral language can be maintained alongside a central one, a central language alongside a supercentral one, and so on. However, moves from one level to the next very frequently are accompanied by language attrition and disruptions in transmission. When the Diola speaker learns Wolof, she may decide only to transmit Wolof to her children. This situation is what poses the greatest threat to the 4000–5000 peripheral languages. Not only do very few people learn peripheral languages as second languages, but first-language speakers often give them up as they are pulled to the center.

Those peripheral languages located within the so-called language hotspots are those clearly most at risk for extinction, followed by the peripheral languages elsewhere. However, if we think into the future, it is possible to imagine the gradual displacement of the central languages as well. The major languages of Southern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia are important national languages, which also serve as the vehicular language of education in the nations where they are spoken. But from Sweden to Denmark, Poland to Czech Republic, the young and the educated are increasingly multilingual, often in a supercentral language such as French, Russian,
or Spanish, and very often in English as well. While the central languages are not in immediate danger of loss, the ubiquity and economic potency of the hypercentral language of English have many people and governments worried.

We will consider the possible fate of only one European language, level 3 Swedish. Although Sweden has language minority groups, 95% of Swedes speak Swedish, which is also spoken in parts of Finland and is mutually intelligible with the other North Germanic languages, Norwegian and Danish. For several centuries, it has also been the primary language of local and federal government. It is also the primary vehicular language of education. In these respects, Swedish is a so-called healthy national language with 9 million speakers, giving it a relatively high number of speakers worldwide, a very high proportion of use within Sweden, and the support of social structures of education and government. When we consider these factors, Swedish is a very healthy language, especially when compared with the peripheral languages found in the hotspots.

There are signs, however, that some Swedes perceive Swedish to be threatened. The perceived threat comes from Sweden's de facto second language, which is none of Sweden's neighboring languages (German, Danish, Finnish, or Norwegian), but rather English. Fully 89% of Sweden's population say they speak English well enough to have at least a basic conversation, almost as many people who claim to speak Swedish. And their use of English is not sporadic – 39% of all Swedes say they use English on a daily basis, while another 20% say they use it frequently but not daily. This means that almost three-fifths of all Swedes use English on a very regular basis, and almost nine-tenths are able to do so with great facility. This facility comes from the fact that all Swedish schoolchildren are required to study English, and proficiency in English is required for entrance into Swedish universities. A great deal of television and radio programming is available in English, which reinforces school-based acquisition. English is now fully integrated into Swedish culture, government, and civic life.

From its days as a great European power in the seventeenth century, through to the rise of the modern Swedish nation, Swedes never felt the need to declare an official language. The language of government and civic life has always been Swedish, and therefore any law proclaiming the same would have been redundant. However, in 2005, with the forces of globalization evermore present and English more widespread than ever, a bill was proposed to name Swedish the official language of the state. The bill narrowly failed. Three years later, a similar bill was proposed, and this time it passed, designating Swedish the main language of Sweden for the first time in Swedish history. One the one hand, the law simply describes what is an empirical reality – Swedish is the main language of the state. On the other hand, the very passing of the law implies that there is a perceived need for it.

Languages that have been spoken for thousands of years can be lost remarkably quickly – sometimes in as little as a generation – when the local ecologies in which they are embedded get disrupted, and their speakers are displaced or intimidated. The reversal of language attrition, namely language revitalization, is unfortunately much harder to achieve, either for practical reasons, for instance, there are few
remaining speakers, or for issues of social power, for instance, these speakers lack access to needed resources and support. While language attrition is very often easy to initiate and easy to achieve, revitalization is difficult to initiate and difficult to achieve. Hebrew is, of course, the most spectacular success story with zero native speakers a century and a half ago and over five million today. We mentioned the revitalization effort for Hawaiian, now with 8000 speakers, in the Language Profile to Chapter 7 and again in Chapter 11, and it considered something of a success story. So is the revitalization of another Austronesian language, M¯ori, with 60,000 speakers now, a rebound from near-extinction through dedicated revitalization efforts.

Strategies for revitalizing native languages depend on the wishes of the community and the vitality of the language. If the language is relatively healthy but not used in schools, communities can develop two-way dual-language immersion programs to promote bilingualism. If, on the other hand, the language is spoken only by a few elderly speakers, communities may pair elders with young adults to teach the language through conversation. All preservation efforts – whether they involve linguists, community activists, or only the speakers themselves – must take into account the entire language loop; that is, what is relevant and important to the speakers. Harrison (2010) cautions that some preservation efforts, such as writing dictionaries, grammars, and recordings, have the value of museum artifacts rather than of living language.

Nevertheless, we, the authors, see the value of the use of technology in producing native-language scripts in the digital era and in pedagogical strategies in native communities. The most successful revitalization efforts have always been those that help a language adapt to new conditions, and the new conditions now are digital. A notable exception are the Amish, who have been successful at maintaining Pennsylvania Dutch by opting out of globalization altogether and maintaining the historical conditions in which their language is supported.

The Hawaiians we saw in Chapter 11 are not the only language community to use modern technology in the pursuit of language revitalization. Young speakers of Shoshone developed a monolingual Shoshone video game titled
Enee
‘fear' to teach Shoshone language in an entertaining way. A Cherokee language app can be downloaded onto smartphones and other digital devices from the online iTunes store. The M¯ori stream videos of fluent speakers on their websites and have created a digital repository of M¯ori poetry (Ka‘ai et al. 2013). While these technologies cannot by themselves reverse the attrition of indigenous languages, they can increase community access to endangered languages while at the same time making the languages seem relevant in the digital age.

A powerful resource for endangered languages is the Unicode Consortium, mentioned in passing in Chapter 5. The question of whether or not to develop writing systems for indigenous languages is an important one in many community language revitalization efforts. Some indigenous communities with unwritten languages believe language to be sacred only in oral form and choose not to develop writing systems for revitalization. Others are eager to record their languages and promote them with new technologies. However, the development of a script may not be enough. In the digital age, languages also need fonts.

Unicode is a universal catalogue for all of the characters in all of the world's writing systems that have fonts to be used in all modern software. When a script is encoded
in Unicode, speakers of languages using those scripts have access to the breadth of knowledge via the Internet, ease of communication via email, and immediate online commercial transactions that characterize written language in the digital age. Speakers of languages with scripts not included in Unicode are left out of these technological advances or must participate using another language or script. If the speakers are involved in revitalization efforts, inclusion in Unicode facilitates native-language education, such that materials can be typed, and therefore literacy in the target language. Thus, the encoding of scripts for indigenous and minority languages is essential for those language communities wishing to use their languages digitally.

The process, however, is not easy. All additions to the Unicode catalogue require a written proposal, a step that assumes those requesting encoding for their languages are bilinguals or have outside assistance. Because a given script may vary from variety to variety, significant time and financial expense may be required to standardize the script before requesting Unicode encoding. These factors may deter indigenous language communities from requesting that their language's script be encoded. Approximately 100 scripts used by indigenous communities in Africa, the Americas, and Asia remain unencoded, not including those scripts that have not yet been devised for previously unwritten languages. The Script Encoding Initiative, hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, seeks to help language communities prepare the formal proposals required to request Unicode encoding.

In the West African nations of Guinea, Ivory Coast, and Mali, speakers of languages such as Bambara, Dyula, and Maninka write their languages using an alphabet known as N'ko. The script was developed in 1949 in order to give African languages a script suited to their linguistic features, rather than European ones. Originally used to write only Maninka, the script became so valuable that it was recruited for use in other languages in the region. It short, N'ko was a twentieth-century success story suited to twentieth-century technology.

Sixty years following the introduction of the N'ko in West Africa, the digital age arrived, and with it, new forms of written communication. Email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media emerged as important platforms for written language. But with no official computer typeface, or font, speakers of languages that use the N'ko alphabet were blocked from participating in the digital revolution using their mother tongues. A lack of access to global technology is a factor that facilitates language attrition, while a sign of linguistic vitality in the twenty-first century is whether or not a language can by typed in its own script.

The younger generation in the country of Georgia, for instance, has made an alphabet choice. Facebook became popular in Georgia around 2008. For the first two or three years, posting was carried out in the Latin alphabet. But, then, around 2011, young Georgians decided they wanted to write in the Georgian alphabet, and now Facebook postings among Georgians are in their own script.

The Microsoft Local Language Program is another powerful resource for endangered languages. It is designed to introduce technology into the developing world in a way that respects local languages, including developing fonts for languages with unique scripts. In the 2000s, the program teamed up with linguists and language organizers in Africa to develop a font suited to a wide range of languages in Africa. The font is called Ebrima and is suitable for all languages written with the N'ko scripts, including Bambara, Dyula, and Maninka. In the years since Ebrima was introduced,
more literature has been published in Maninka, including weekly and monthly periodicals. This suggests that more people may want to consume the news in written form in their first language.

Not all language communities have responded to Microsoft's language initiatives so favorably. As Harrison (2010) points out, the ethnic group in Chile known as the Mapuche were angered when Microsoft translated Windows into their language Mapudungun. A community leader wrote this open response: “The appropriation of our language as fundamental part of our culture by researchers, linguists and public officials constitutes violation of our inherent and inalienable right to our cultural heritage.” This reminds us that revitalization efforts – such language communities choose to engage in them – are only successful in so far as they work within the community's orientation to language.