Disappearing Languages Worldwide (for Ali)

[THOTH]

Profiles of Disappearing Languages Worldwide

Tuesday, June 19, 2001

 

Snapshots of language losses worldwide:

 

• North America: Eighty percent of the 260 native languages still spoken in the United States and Canada aren't being learned by children, one reason for language loss. Eyak, native to the coast of Alaska's Prince William Sound, has one remaining speaker.

 

• South America: Hundreds of languages died as a result of the Spanish conquest. About 80 percent of the continent's remaining 640 languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people each; 27 face extinction. Many languages from the Amazon region have fewer than 500 speakers, including Arikapu, which has six.

 

• Africa: In the birthplace of nearly one-third of the world's languages, 54 are believed dead, with another 116 nearing extinction.

 

• Asia: More than half of Asia's native languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers each, although 3 billion people, or half the world's population, live on the continent.

 

• Australia: About 90 percent of its 250 aboriginal languages face extinction.

 

• Europe: Nearly 90 percent of Russians speak Russian, the language enforced during the Soviet era. Consequently, most of the country's 100 other native languages, nearly all of them Siberian tongues, are near extinction, including Udihe.

 

Some facts about the world's 6,800 languages:

 

Eight countries account for more than half of all languages.

 

• Papua New Guinea, 832 languages.

• Indonesia, 731.

• Nigeria, 515.

• India, 400.

• Mexico, Cameroon and Australia, just under 300 each.

• Brazil, 234.

 

• The island of New Guinea, which the nation of Papua New Guinea shares with the Indonesian state of Irian Jaya, is home to just 0.1 percent of the world's population, yet its residents speak one-sixth of all languages, or some 1,100 tongues.

 

• More than 100 languages can be heard on the tiny archipelago of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific Ocean near Australia. It is home to about 190,000 people.

 

• India has 15 official languages, more than any other nation.

 

The 10 most common first languages, and number of speakers:

 

• Mandarin Chinese, 885 million.

• Spanish, 332 million.

• English, 322 million.

• Arabic, 220 million.

• Bengali, 189 million.

• Hindi, 182 million.

• Portuguese, 170 million.

• Russian, 170 million.

• Japanese, 125 million.

• German, 98 million.

 

• Percentage of world's languages of Asian origin: 32

 

• Percentage of world's languages of African origin: 30

 

• Percentage of world's languages of Pacific origin: 19

 

• Percentage of world's languages of American origin: 15

 

• Percentage of world's languages of European origin: 4

 

• Percentage of world's children raised as bilingual speakers: 66 percent.

 

• Percentage of U.S. residents who are bilingual: 6.3 percent.

[ThornyRose]

Ubykh from the Caucasus became extinct in Turkey. Not that the homeland of the Ubykh was Turkey but because the last speaker died here... I think some linguists did compile a dictionary before he died, though...

[Guest]

the last Ubykh speaker died in 1996 in western Turkey. They were a North West Caucasian people who were deported by Russia to the Ottoman empire. Their language was related to Cherkess. If Turkey had not forcefully Turkify everybody this language would have not been extinct now. Both Russia and Turkey are guilty in this case.

[aurguplu]

ubykh was a close relative of cherkess, and was recorded by the french linguist dumezil (a major authority on indo-european and caucasian languages) shortly before the last native speaker died.

 

the turkish government's turkification attempts have nothing to do with ubykh's extinction. ubykh was already on the way to extinction before the tribe came to turkey: since ubykh was spoken by a single village (or a few at the most) people had to resort to the closely related cherkess (which variety i don't know) for outside communication and cherkess had already largely replaced ubykh in everday communication by the end of the last century. people still learned ubykh, but the younger generations in turkey opted for cherkess and ubykh was completely replaced by cherkess, not turkish, in everyday communication inside the communities. all speakers are reported to speak fluent turkish, too.

 

a note on the turkish government's attempts to suppress minority cultures: turks generally do - or did - that with kurdish. from the earlier decades of the republic until the seventies life was generally made difficult for the non-muslim (especially christian) minorities which resulted in the exodus of a most greeks and armenians (currently there are about three thousand greeks and sixty-five to eighty thousand armenians in the whole country).

 

to the best of my knowledge, turks took no attempts to suppress caucasian cultures, as these are 1) not native to anatolia and therefore not in a position to advance claims, 2) small in number, 3) not known to have sided with the enemy at any time, 4) muslim, and 5) generally inclined to accept themselves as turks.

 

turkey is rightly accused of many human rights abuses and suppression of minorities, but some accusations are unfounded. the "suppression of caucasian minorities" is one of them.

 

[ June 20, 2001: Message edited by: aurguplu ]

 

[ June 20, 2001: Message edited by: aurguplu ]

[Guest]

Dear Ali Suat

If your arguement is that Turkish autorities did not Turkify the Ubykh but they themselves began to Speak Cherkess, then How you can clarify why the Cherkess themselves speak Turkish in Anatolia?

 

I strongly have doubt that there live today 80 000 Armenians in Turkey. If you count the number of the Moslem Armenians (Hamshen people) to this number this number may be high. But christian Armenians in Turkey today is estimated at 25 000, some sources speak of 50 000.

 

The number of Christian Greeks is that much you said, but there is a big community of Pontic moslem greeks in Turkey, which obviously are not counted as Greeks by the Turkish authorities.

[aurguplu]

dear tornado,

many cherkess are bilingual or trilingual (cherkess is a blanket term for a number of closely related languages) out of their own accord. of course, if you are living in anatolia, a degree of familiarity with the turkish language might prove useful.

i have known a good number of cherkess (i have cherkess and georgian (shapsug, if anyone knows who they are) blood myself) and have never heard of anyone complaining of any kind of oppression. but they do resent that the younger generations speak little or no cherkess.

my great-grandmother's mother was cherkess. she knew cherkess, of course, but didn't pass it on to her daughters except lullabies. i am the fourth generation and nothing remains.

my grandmother had to learn turkish when she came here as a child. she was never forced to abandon greek, and she still spoke greek at home to her mother and sisters. but they spoke turkish as everyday language. they also used greek as a conspiracy language against us like "ali suat fingered the mousse-au-chocolat. he is not going to have any of it tonight." and didn't teach us any, then complained in their old age that we didn't learn any. people are not consistent.

i hope that sheds some light on this issue.

re the armenians. i heard the 65-80,000 estimate from a turkish armenian. this must be the christian armenians. added to this are several thousand hemşinlis, who do not say in public that they are armenian. in fact, i read in sevan nişanyan's turkey guide that the younger generation disbelieves that hemşince (the hemşin language) is a dialect of armenian. of course, there are also thousands, if not tens of thousands of people who are of part or pure armenian descent but do not disclose the fact. an armenian friend of mine, a sociologist, had told me over ten years ago that the number of armenians in turkey did approach a hundred thousand. what she based that figure on, and what categories she included in it, i do not know. this is the highest estimate that i had heard, but i am inclined to accept her as a reliable source.

as far as pontic greeks, i know that a few do say that they are not turks. most, however, vote for the grey wolves, in fact grey wolves are particularly strong in the black sea region. it is a well known fact that a minority that is trying to integrate itself into the surrounding majority exaggerates its attachment to the identity of the majority it tries to assimilate into. we had discussed something like this a few months ago with levon if i recall correctly.

i hope this has been of some help

regards,

[ThornyRose]

I know the Şapsığ... Ιn fact, Ethem Bey was one (and I often use his uprisings to ask people why the Circassians themselves were not deported and unfortunately subjected to deprivations), and one fellow Turk in my private forum (not the one I advertised), Attila aka Marquis, is part Şapsığ himself.

I am the fifth generation with respect to my maternal grandfather's family.

LOL... Like every Turk I've met on the internet has some Circassian in him/her... LOL...

Although it is true for the greater part that Circassians were left alone, they were closely watched, as the majority had the tendency to lean towards the left - those years and all... There were a few incidents related to me where weddings were peeked into by officials, but nothing more...

[Guest]

dear Ali

 

If the government have no problems with local languages, these will stay alive especially in a lrge group of the Cherkess. Actually we did make the basque re-alive!

 

But about the Georgians of Turkey I should say I don't know much about these. But Iranyar (Iranian Georgian) has a friend who is a georgian of Turkey and he says that those who are Turkified are Islamist, but there are a group of Georgians, who are leftish and somehow separatist, they have good contacts with similar groups of the Laz, the Kurds and the Pontic Greeks.

[raja]

The number of christian Armenians living in Turkey right now is approximately 75000.In the early 80's the number had dropped to as low as 40000 because of a mass immigration then due to the military regime as well as fear of harm because of ASALA's actions.However,in the last 5-6 years prior to the eartquake the immigration flow reversed and some of the people who left Turkey returned back.The number rose as high as 80000.But then,after the eartquake again a flow of immigration started and the final number for now is around 75000.

[aurguplu]

dear thoth

i think the world is moving toward forming a single civilisation. there are, of course, bumps and rocks on the road, but i think that's where we are going.

russia appears to be on the way to degenerating into a huge congo with decaying nukes and permafrost, and if it goes on like that in fifty years it will be like the ottoman empire in the nineteenth century. big and once mighty but practically powerless in the world. no one will care about what russians think.

china will either head for the same future or reform, if it opt for the second it has at least three generations of work to do to provide its citizens with a decent lifestyle.

nothing good will ever come out of the middle east unless and until the israeli palestinian war stops and fundamentalist islam disappears. the muslim world has a very long and uncertain way to go before joining contemporary civilisation.

southeast asia and africa are not giving much of a hope either. same goes for south america.

this leaves northern america, western europe, and japan as major forces that can shape the future of the world.

of these, japan has traditionally refrained from exporting its own culture, and with that language, it would have few chances.

in europe, the major languages are german, french and english. german cannot be the candidate for anything international for obvious reasons, and french has steadily lost ground to english even in its former strongholds, chiefly because of american, not british, influence.

we are living in the first era where someone can communicate with someone else over such distances without ever seeing the other person. and we are doing it in english.

more is published in english than either french or german. if you must be ahead of technology, you must master english.

the world has seen a number of lingua francas throughout history, but none of these had the distribution, and frankly speaking, sheer good luck that english has today.

i think that in at most a few generations time english will become the lingua franca of everything technical, and the other languages will be relegated to a secondary status. and sadly, many of the endangered languages of today dont have much of a viable future.

it is a sad reality, but i am afraid that is the way it is going to be.

meanwhile, we must fibnd intelligent ways to conserve the languages at least as everyday languages.

regards,

[nairakev]

ali,

I won't be so pessimist while analysing Russia's future.

It leaves a very though period of mutation. Such a huge organism as appears Russia, cannot traverse a mutation itinery without painful cataclismes and hardships.

 

Russia is a Great Power and it will make its come back on the world arena.

 

It's a young nation alike France, UK, Germany and Turkey. But the difference is that it lays from Norway to Japan.

 

It will never let itself be ignored. Russia has very clear ambitions and I'm sure it will overcome soon its domestic political and economic crisis. Then it will have its say.

 

Russians never had been left to choose their future. It's the first time that their applying for this challenge. And I'm sure Russia will come out a stable and alternative world power.

 

Since EU is in the stage of development.

 

USA became the only world power without any contre-balance.

This is pretty dangerous! It's damn dangerous. I think Russia, EU, China should contre-balance USA, until strong International institutions will be finaly established...

 

Then we'll make a path towards one unique civilisation. Don't you think?