Cultural Anthropology SSC-327

The emergence of linguistic anthropology, as mentioned in Chapter 1, was prompted by the need to document disappearing indigenous languages in the United States. Today, anthropologists and other scholars, as well as descendant language communities themselves, are still concerned about the rapid loss of languages (Fishman 1991; Maffi 2005). The task of documenting declining languages is urgent. It is often accompanied by applied work aimed at preserving and reviving endangered and dying languages (see Think Like an Anthropologist). Scholars have proposed four phases or degrees of language decline and loss (Walsh 2005):

· Language shift, or language decay, is a category of language decline when speakers have a limited vocabulary in their native language and more often use a new language in which they may be semifluent or fluent (Hill 2001).

· Language endangerment exists when a language has fewer than 10,000 speakers.

· Near-extinction is a situation in which only a few elderly speakers are still living.

· Language extinction occurs when the language has no competent speakers.

Keeping track of endangered and dying languages is difficult because no one is sure how many languages have existed in the recent past or even how many exist now (Crystal 2000). Estimates of the number of living languages today range between 5,000 and 7,000. Part of the explanation for the fuzzy numbers is the problem in separating languages from dialects. The largest number of languages of any world region is found on the island of New Guinea, which comprises the country of Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian territory of West Papua, and several neighboring small islands (Foley 2000). Over 1,000 languages exist in this area, many from completely separate language families.

Language extinction is especially acute in the Australia–Pacific region, where 99.5 percent of the indigenous languages have fewer than 100,000 speakers (Nettle and Romaine 2000:40). The situation of indigenous languages in the Americas, Siberia, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia is becoming increasingly serious. Over half of the world’s languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers, and one-fourth have fewer than 1,000 speakers.

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Efforts to revive or maintain local languages face many challenges (Fishman 2001). Political opposition may come from governments that fear local identity movements. Governments are often averse to devoting financial resources to supporting minority language programs. Deciding which version of an endangered language to preserve may have political consequences at the local level (Nevins 2004). Notable achievements have been made, however, with perhaps one of the most robust examples of language maintenance occurring in French-speaking Québec.

Approaches to language maintenance and revitalization must respond to local circumstances and to factors such as how serious the degree of loss is, how many living speakers there are, what version of the language should be maintained or revived, and what resources for maintenance and revitalization programs are available. Major strategies include the following (Walsh 2005):

· Formal classroom instruction

· A master–apprentice system in which an elder teaches a nonspeaker in a one-on-one situation

· Web-based tools and services to support language learning

Each method has both promise and pitfalls. One thing is key: It takes living communities to activate and keep alive the knowledge of a language (Maffi 2003).

Think Like an Anthropologist