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Language Preservation (From the Master's Thesis of Randi Nott, North Central College, Naperville, IL, Winter, 1997)
Language and Indigenous Peoples
Linguists have estimated that there are somewhere between 3,000 to 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, but only 276 languages are spoken by a million people or more. About 80-90% of all languages are spoken by indigenous peoples, and when you look at their numbers, these same people only make up 10% of the world's population; therefore 80-90% of language diversity is vested in 10% of the world's population. Most of the languages spoken by indigenous people are fragile and are disappearing at an alarming rate.1 Each language represents millenniums worth of accumulated knowledge and culture. In the United States - where linguistic experts estimate that 155 of the surviving 175 Native American languages are falling permanently silent - language death is already well advanced.2
Language Diversity / Bio-Diversity
Many people find this fact disturbing because we see that there is a parallel between language diversity and bio-diversity. We understand the need to preserve endangered plants, animals and eco-systems because they are critical to the health of our planet and therefore to humankind. The loss of the hundreds of languages that have already passed into history is an intellectual catastrophe in every way comparable in magnitude to the ecological catastrophe we face today as the earth's tropical forests are swept away by human greed and desperation. Each language still spoken is fundamental to the personal, social and - a key term in the discourse of indigenous peoples - spiritual identity of its speakers. They know that without their language they would be less than they are, and they are engaged in the most urgent struggles to protect their linguistic heritage.
Anthropologists maintain that the adaptive success of you species is due to culture. Culture implies knowledge and communication of knowledge is through language. Just as the reduction of biodiversity threatens life, the reduction of language and cultural diversity diminishes the adaptational strength of our species because it lowers the pool of knowledge from which we can draw.3 To preserve language is to preserve human survival skills.
1. Bernard, H. Russell Preserving Language Diversity from Human Organization, Volume 51, No. 1, page 82. 2. Chicago Tribune, Section 1, page 13. 3. Bernard, H. Russell Preserving Language Diversity from Human Organization, Volume 51, No. 1, page 92.
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