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Protecting endangered languages

 

In this last ‘translation industry updates’ article for 2024, we’ll be talking about language endangerment and why this matters.

 

The forces of globalisation mean that international communication is increasingly dominated by a relatively small number of languages, which might lead some pragmatists to argue that the value of learning and protecting small-diffusion languages is limited, or that some degree of language extinction is inevitable. But to make this argument is to miss out on the far more valuable aspects of language. Each language represents a particular view of the world, and a particular culture. Since languages are strongly tied to the places they originate from, each language carries its own local terms for plants, animals, the climate, the weather, and many other factors, meaning that a lot of wisdom and locally-specific knowledge about the world is tied up in small-diffusion languages. Languages are becoming extinct at a much faster rate than species, yet they are also a product of the environment and people and therefore it makes sense that we should endeavour to protect them in the same way that we look after every other element of our ecosystem.

 

Before looking at how languages can be protected, it’s important to understand how languages become threatened to begin with. One major historical factor in language extinction is colonisation. According to BBC Future, Australia holds the world record for endangered languages relative to population size, with around 100 of the country’s 300 Aboriginal languages already having become extinct and 95% of the remainder being in danger of doing so. The same article states that of the 280 indigenous languages known in the US at the time of first European contact, only around half still have speakers, and in the case of both places, only a small minority of these languages are still being taught to children.

 

It’s also useful to reflect on the fact that factors that might otherwise be seen as indicators of development can have a detrimental impact on language survival. One key factor in language endangerment is the need to use a more dominant language for work or to access healthcare or education, meaning that over time other languages can come to be supplanted or viewed as being less prestigious. The World Economic Forum describes how researchers from The Australian National University linked higher levels of schooling with accelerated language loss, since being taught in a dominant language tends to overshadow regional languages and lead people to prioritise the ‘main’ language, while the construction of roads and the associated greater movement of people has also been found to be a key indicator of potential language endangerment.

 

Migration is another key factor, and something which is described in detail by Language City writer Ross Perlin, who maps the incredibly diverse neighbourhoods of New York while highlighting that most of the city’s huge range of languages are only likely to survive for a few generations in their new setting. Migration tends to disrupt intergenerational bonds and disperse communities of speakers, making it harder to use the language organically and collectively, while younger generations are much more likely to mainly operate in the language of their new host country. Historically, there has been stigma around speaking an ‘immigrant’ language and this marginalisation has hindered efforts to keep speaking a language too.

 

Against this backdrop, there is an increasing understanding of the importance of cultivating small-diffusion languages and ensuring that they survive throughout the generations. We’ll end our article with a discussion of some of the proposals that have been raised to help languages to thrive. 

 

Firstly, a growing awareness of imminent language extinction has led to a number of high-profile documentation projects being set up, such as Crowdsourcing Romeyka, set up by Professor Ioanna Sitaridou of the University of Cambridge to capture audio recordings by native speakers of this two-thousand-strong language spoken mainly by older people in remote terrain in Turkey. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the world, the Ma! Iwaidja app helps speakers of the Australian indigenous language Iwaidja to record words and phrases while also containing a dictionary feature, to list just one other example of a documentation effort. Yet despite this, a commonly-made counter-argument to preserving endangered languages through writing or audio is that this won’t necessarily lead to the language being more commonly used in the contemporary real-life settings that will enable it to thrive, which is why the question of language documentation is somewhat controversial in certain circles. 

 

Tech solutions have also been held up as a way of raising the profile of endangered languages and giving them a place in new contexts, and it’s true that an increasing number of tech platforms from Google Translate to Wikipedia support indigenous and small-diffusion languages, with Navajo alone having 323,000 Duolingo learners as of 2024. However, while digitalisation can create new opportunities to raise awareness of potential language endangerment and gather material from speakers, it has also been argued to hasten the decline of languages, since only a small number of languages dominate the digital space, making it more difficult for other languages to complete. Indeed, The Newsroom describes 97% of the world’s languages as being ‘digitally disadvantaged’, while researcher András Kornai argues that less than 5% of all languages are likely to ‘ascend’ to the digital realm.

 

Yet perhaps the biggest practical challenge of all is making indigenous or other smaller-diffusion languages appealing to younger generations, and therefore ensuring that they continue to be actively used and spoken even in the face of more widespread societal or cultural change. Sometimes this can come about by reframing a language and presenting it in a different light. Part of the reason the critically-acclaimed Kneecap film won awards in the UK and in Ireland is that it presented the Irish language as being youthful, contemporary, and different from the outdated stereotypes that had previously been reflected in textbooks, and this is important in the sense that making languages feel relevant to younger audiences can help the next generations to identify with them, and therefore be more likely to continue using them. .

 

Lastly, in an age when language extinction is often viewed as being inevitable in the same sense as other environmental decline, it’s important to recognise and appreciate the value of all languages, including those spoken by very small communities or in rural or remote areas. The world’s most widely-spoken languages, particularly those originating from Europe, tend to benefit from an unfair level of prestige relative to languages with smaller numbers of speakers, yet every language is complex in its own way, and many small languages without writing systems are equally or even more complex than international languages with many millions of speakers.

 

In the words of researcher Johanneke Sytsema in an article published by Oxford University, “Once languages die, you don’t get them back, because they’ve grown over thousands and thousands of years. Every language has its own beauty. And that’s why it’s so important.”

 

Thank you for reading our translation industry updates in 2024, and we look forward to sharing more with you in the new year.

 

Sources

 

BBC Future | Rachel Nuwer

Languages: Why we must save dying tongues

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages 

 

Britannica | Noah Tesch

Why Do Languages Die?

https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-languages-die

 

Duolingo | Matt

The Complete List of EVERY Duolingo Language in 2024

https://duoplanet.com/duolingo-languages-list 

 

Fortune | Karthik Chidambaram

A language dies every 2 weeks. AI can help save them from digital extinction–or accelerate their demise

https://fortune.com/2024/01/30/language-dies-ai-can-help-save-digital-extinction-demise-culture-tech

 

International Journal of Applied Linguistics | Dave Sayers

Using language to help people, or using people to help language? A capabilities framework of language policy

https://doi.org/10.1111/ijal.12463 



PLoS ONE | András Kornai

Digital Language Death

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077056 

 

Smithsonian | Maria Anderson

Why languages become endangered, and how we can keep them alive

https://www.si.edu/stories/why-languages-become-endangered-and-how-we-can-keep-them-alive

 

The Endangered Languages Project

Endangered languages: Why so important?

https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about_importance 

 

The Guardian | Esther Addley

Endangered Greek dialect is ‘living bridge’ to ancient world, researchers say 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/03/endangered-greek-dialect-living-bridge-ancient-world-romeyka 

 

The Newsroom

https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2024/m02/saving-endangered-languages-one-font-at-a-time.html 

 

The Week | Harriet Marsden

How technology helps and harms endangered languages

https://theweek.com/tech/how-technology-helps-and-harms-endangered-languages 

 

University of Oxford Humanities Division

Could social media save endangered languages?

https://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/article/how-languages-become-endangeredand-how-social-media-could-save-them-0 

 

World Economic Forum | Johnny Wood

1,500 endangered languages could disappear by the end of the century

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/01/languages-endangered-diversity-loss-spoken

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