五个语言濒危的“热点地区”

Languages Racing to Extinction in 5 Global "Hotspots"

From Alaska to Australia, hundreds of languages around the world are teetering on the brink of extinction—some being spoken only by a single person, according to a new study.

The research has revealed five hotspots where languages are vanishing most rapidly: eastern Siberia, northern Australia, central South America, Oklahoma, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest (see map of the hotspots).

"Languages are undergoing a global extinction crisis that greatly exceeds the pace of species extinction," said David Harrison, a linguistics professor at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College.

Harrison and Gregory Anderson, both affiliated with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in Oregon, traveled the world to interview the last speakers of critically endangered languages as part of the National Geographic Society's Enduring Voices Project.

(National Geographic News is a division of the National Geographic Society.)

More than half of the world's 7,000 languages are expected to die out by the end of the century, often taking with them irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world, Harrison said.

"Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it's only in people's heads," he said.

"We are seeing in front of our eyes the erosion of the human knowledge base."

Slow Deaths

In the last 500 years, an estimated half of the world's languages, from Etruscan to Tasmanian, have become extinct.

But researchers say the languages of the world are now vanishing faster than ever in recorded history.

More than 500 languages may be spoken by fewer than ten people.

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

September 18, 2007

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070918-languages-extinct.html

[评论]

“语言消亡”这种现象本身是语言系统自身进化中的一个阶段还是退化中的一个阶段？在一些语言消亡的同时，一些新的语言也在出现，除了为数不多的已有的克里奥尔语之外，一些语言的变体出现了，一些语言的方言离“母语”更远了。“语言消亡”很值得关注，而“语言出新”也因该进入人们的视野，尽管后者比起前者来，辨别起来要难得多。我们要尽可能的挽救“语言消亡”给人类文化带来的损失，但就语言本身来说，我们没有理由恐慌。