Despite all that evidence for past extinctions of languages, modern language extinctions are different because of their greatly increased rate. Extinctions of the last 10,000 years left us with 7,000 languages today, but extinctions of the next century or so will leave us with only a few hundred. That record-high rate of language extinction is due to the homogenizing influences of the spreads of globalization and of state government over the whole world.
As an illustration of the fates of most languages, consider Alaska’s 20 native Inuit and Indian languages. The Eyak language, formerly spoken by a few hundred Indians on Alaska’s south coast, had declined by 1982 to two native speakers, Marie Smith Jones and her sister Sophie Borodkin (Plate 47). Their children speak only English. With Sophie’s death in 1992 at the age of 80, and Marie’s death in 2008 at the age of 93, the language world of the Eyak people reached its final silence. Seventeen other native Alaskan languages are moribund, in the sense that not a single child is learning them. Although they are still spoken by older people, they too will meet the fate of Eyak when the last of those speakers dies, and almost all of them have fewer than a thousand speakers each. That leaves only two native Alaskan languages still being learned by children and thus not yet doomed: Siberian Yupik, with 1,000 speakers, and Central Yupik, with a grand total of 10,000 speakers.
In monographs summarizing the current status of languages, one encounters the same types of phrases monotonously repeated. “Ubykh [that Turkish language with 80 consonants]…the last fully competent speaker, Tevfik Esen, of Haci Osman, died in Istanbul 10/92. A century ago there were 50,000 speakers in the Caucasus valleys east of the Black Sea.” “Cupeño [an Indian language of southern California]… nine speakers out of a total population of 150… all over 50 years old… nearly extinct.” “Yamana [an Indian language formerly spoken in southern Chile and Argentina]… three women speakers [in Chile], who are married to Spanish men and raised their children as Spanish speakers… extinct in Argentina.”
The degree of language endangerment varies around the world. The continent in most desperate straits linguistically is Aboriginal Australia, where originally about 250 languages were spoken, all with under 5,000 speakers. Today, half of those Australian languages are already extinct; most of the survivors have under 100 speakers; fewer than 20 are still being passed on to children; and at most a few are likely still to be spoken by the end of the 21st century. Nearly as desperate is the plight of the native languages of the Americas. Of the hundreds of former Native American languages of North America, one-third are already extinct, another third have only a few old speakers, and only two (Navajo and Yupik Eskimo) are still being used for broadcast on local radio stations—a sure sign of trouble in this world of mass communications. Among the thousand or so native languages originally spoken in Central and South America, the only one with a secure future is Guarani, which along with Spanish is the national language of Paraguay. The sole continent with hundreds of native languages not already in dire straits is Africa, where most surviving native languages have tens of thousands or even millions of speakers, and where populations of small sedentary farmers currently seem to being holding on to their languages.
How languages disappear
How do languages go extinct? Just as there are different ways of killing people—by a quick blow to the head, by slow strangulation, or by prolonged neglect—so too are there different ways of eradicating a language. The most direct way is to kill almost all of its speakers. That was how white Californians eliminated the language of the last “wild” Indian of the United States, a man named Ishi (Plate 29) belonging to the Yahi tribe of about 400 people, living near Mount Lassen. In a series of massacres between 1853 and 1870 after the California gold rush had brought hordes of European settlers into California, settlers killed most Yahi, leaving Ishi and his family, then Ishi alone, to survive in hiding until 1911. British colonists eliminated all the native languages of Tasmania in the early 1800s by killing or capturing most Tasmanians, motivated by a bounty of five pounds for each Tasmanian adult and two pounds for each child. Less violent means of death produce similar results. For example, there used to be thousands of Native Americans of the Mandan tribe on the Great Plains of the United States, but by 1992 the number of fluent Mandan speakers was reduced to six old people, especially as a result of cholera and smallpox epidemics between 1750 and 1837.
The next most direct way to eradicate a language is not to kill its speakers, but instead to forbid them to use their language, and to punish them if they are caught doing so. In case you wondered why most North American Indian languages are now extinct or moribund, just consider the policy practised until recently by the United States government regarding those languages. For several centuries we insisted that Indians could be “civilized” and taught English only by removing Indian children from the “barbarous” atmosphere of their parents’ homes to English-language-only boarding schools, where use of Indian languages was absolutely forbidden and punished with physical abuse and humiliation. To justify that policy, J. D. C. Atkins, the U.S. commissioner for Indian affairs from 1885 to 1888, explained, “The instruction of Indians in the vernacular [that is, in an Indian language] is not only of no use to them, but is detrimental to the cause of their education and civilization, and it will not be permitted in any Indian school over which the Government has any control…. This [English] language, which is good enough for a white man and a black man, ought to be good enough for the red man. It is also believed that teaching an Indian youth in his own barbarous dialect is a positive detriment to him. The first step to be taken toward civilization, toward teaching the Indians the mischief and folly of continuing in their barbarous practices, is to teach them the English language.”
After Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879, the Japanese government adopted a solution described as “one nation, one people, one language.” That meant educating Okinawan children to speak Japanese and no longer letting them speak any of the dozen native Okinawan languages. Similarly, when Japan annexed Korea in 1910, it banned the Korean language from Korean schools in favor of Japanese. When Russia re-annexed the Baltic republics in 1939, it replaced the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian languages in schools with Russian, but those Baltic languages continued to be spoken in homes and resumed their status as national languages when the republics regained independence in 1991. The sole surviving Celtic language on the European mainland is Breton, which is still the primary language of half a million French citizens. However, the French government’s official policy is in effect to exclude the Breton language from primary and secondary schools, and Breton’s use is declining.
But in most cases language loss proceeds by the more insidious process now under way at Rotokas. With political unification of an area formerly occupied by sedentary warring tribes come peace, mobility, and increasing intermarriage. Young people in search of economic opportunity abandon their native-speaking villages and move to urban centers, where speakers of their own tribal language are greatly outnumbered by people from other tribal backgrounds, and where people needing to communicate with each other have no option except to speak the majority language. Increasing numbers of couples from different language groups marry and must resort to using the majority language to speak to each other; hence they transmit the majority language to their children. Even if the children do also learn a parental language, they must use the majority language in schools. Those people remaining in their natal village learn the majority language for its access to prestige, power, commerce, and the outside world. Jobs, newspapers, radio, and television overwhelmingly use the majority language shared by most workers, consumers, advertisers, and subscribers.