Ethnologue, 16th edition: reveals the alarming rate at which languages are dying
It’s mind expanding to even take one moment to think about what is involved in mapping every language group in the world.
In the UK we rarely come into contact with established groups that speak anything other than English. When we do we probably start by thinking about the Welsh or Scots languages, but even here there are enclaves of our cities where English would not be the first language and where large groups of people have imported their own dialect from another part of the world.
In other countries, national borders do not necessarily have to define the boundaries of the languages. Once there may have been a tribal group with a significant number of people speaking one language. However, due to an internal fight some members of the tribe went to settle somewhere else, still speaking that language. Time passes and they still have the basic language that they arrived with, but due to different experiences and a need to communicate in a different way with people outside of the tribe, their language has developed in a different way to the original language still spoken by the members of the tribe that stayed put.
Have I lost you now?
Well, I’ll make it short. Trying to work out where languages start and end isn’t as easy as geography and national boundaries, but the Ethnologue tries to do it.
I’ve just listened to a presentation by a couple that work on this publication. The 16th edition is out this month and if you want to buy an impressively large book then it’s the publication for you. However, if you’d just like to get an idea of what’s inside it’s worth visiting Wikipedia or the Ethnologue website itself, where there’s the following table of Nearly Extinct Languages.
