Unesco Atlas Details Languages in Peril

The Jakarta Globe, February 21, 2009 

Nearly 2,500 of the world’s 6,000 languages, including a number of Indonesian dialects, are in danger of extinction, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, warned on Friday. 

Unesco’s “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing,” which was released in Paris in conjunction with International Mother Language Day, which falls on Monday, indicated that a significant number of languages in Indonesia, India, Brazil and Mexico were in peril of extinction. 

In the atlas, previous editions of which were released by Unesco in 1996 and 2001, languages were classified into five categories: not safe, threatened, extremely threatened, critical, and extinct.

The atlas revealed that of the world’s 6,000 languages, over 200 had gone extinct in the past three generations, while 538 were categorized as critical, 502 were extremely threatened, 632 were threatened, and 607 were not safe. 

Two hundred languages have less than 10 speakers, while another 178 have between 10 to 50 speakers, it said. 

The language of Manx, from the Isle of Man in Britain, became extinct in 1974 after Ned Maddrell, its last speaker, passed away. The Eyak language from Alaska died with Marie Smith Jones in 2008. 

“The extinction of a language leads to the disappearance of all forms of cultural heritage, especially the legacy of tradition and the linguistic expression of its speakers, from poems and stories to proverbs and jokes,” said Koichiro Matsuura, director of Unesco, on the agency’s Web site. 

Over thirty linguists were involved in the atlas’s preparation, which showed that language extinction happened everywhere across all economic conditions. 

Almost two-thirds of world’s languages are found in sub-Saharan Africa, and linguists have predicted that some 10 percent of those languages could be extinct by the next century.

In France, 13 languages are also under threat. 

At least 169 of Indonesia’s 742 languages have less than 500 speakers, and were therefore listed as being under threat. 

Antara