![]() He has not been heard from since.įor these reasons and others, languages are dying all over the world. Last August, a linguist in China was arrested for trying to open schools that taught his native language, Uighur. Extreme persecution still happens as well. Today, many English-speaking Americans are still hostile towards non-English speakers, especially Spanish ones. Well into the 20th Century, many Native American children in Canada and the US were sent to boarding schools, where they were often forbidden to speak their native language. Speakers of minority languages have suffered a long history of persecution. Sometimes, especially in immigrant communities, parents will decide not to teach their children their heritage language, perceiving it as a potential hindrance to their success in life. In this scenario, the majority speaks another language – English, Mandarin, Swahili – so speaking that language is key to accessing jobs, education and opportunities. Languages usually reach the point of crisis after being displaced by a socially, politically and economically dominant one, as linguists put it. “I realised Kiyansi exists more in my imagination than in practice,” he says. On a recent trip to his home village, he found himself searching for words and struggling to keep up with the conversation. In 40 years living away from the DRC, Mufwene has only come across only two people who speak the language. Salikoko Mufwene, a linguist at the University of Chicago, grew up speaking Kiyansi, spoken by a small ethnic group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Without practice, even a native language will begin to degrade in the speaker’s mind. “The smaller the number of speakers, the harder it is to get an accurate headcount,” says David Harrison, chair of the linguistics department at Swarthmore College, and co-founder of the non-profit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.Įven if a number of people still speak it, they might live far apart and so not converse with one other – or in the case of the pre-Columbian Mexican language Ayapaneco, the last two surviving speakers refused to talk to each other for years. There are some famous cases – Marie Smith Jones passed away in Alaska in 2008, taking the Eyak language with her – but usually they are older individuals (often in failing health) who don’t advertise their language skills. It can be difficult to find these people too. Since there are so many imperilled languages, it’s impossible to label just one as the rarest or most endangered, but at least 100 around the world have only a handful of speakers – from Ainu in Japan to Yagan in Chile. Can language diversity be preserved, or are we on a path to becoming a monolingual species? Today, the top ten languages in the world claim around half of the world’s population. Over the past century alone, around 400 languages – about one every three months – have gone extinct, and most linguists estimate that 50% of the world’s remaining 6,500 languages will be gone by the end of this century (some put that figure as high as 90%, however). So he decided to do something about it.Ĭherokee is far from the only minority language threatened with demise. “I began to realise the urgency of the situation,” Belt says. Children were no longer learning the language either. At that time, just 400 or so Cherokee speakers were left in the Eastern Band, the tribe located in the Cherokee's historic homeland and the one that his wife belongs to. He soon realised that he was a minority among his own people. Yet his wife – also Cherokee – did not speak the language. “I bought a roundtrip ticket to visit her, but I never used the other end of the ticket.” ![]() “All those years ago, she said the thing that attracted her to me was that I was the youngest Cherokee she’d ever met who could speak Cherokee,” he says. Eventually, he wound up in North Carolina in pursuit of a woman he met at school 20 years earlier. In his home, conversations took place in Cherokee.īelt grew up riding horses, and after college bounced around the country doing the rodeo circuit. Tom Belt, a native of Oklahoma, didn’t encounter the English language until he began kindergarten.
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