A 100 years from now there could be only 2,500 languages left of the 7,000 languages used throughout the world, a new report has said.
WASHINGTON: With the loss of one language every month at present, a 100 years from now there could be only 2,500 languages left of the overall 7,000 languages used throughout the world, a new report has said.
Hindi and Bengali are among the world’s top ten languages. The other eight are Mandarin, English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, Malay-Indonesian and French.
While Mandarin is spoken by more than a billion people, English is the most commonly spoken second language and the lingua franca in the international business, media, scientific and academic world. Hindi is spoken by 496,000,000, while Bengali is known by 215,000,000 and English is spoken worldwide by 514,000,000 people.
English language classes are growing in popularity, particularly in China. It is estimated that by 2004 more than 1.2 billion people worldwide were learning English and the number of English speaking residents of China is growing by 20 million every year.
In the US, Chinese is expected to overtake French and German in popularity in school classrooms by 2015, according to the report brought out by the Washington DC-based Environmental Sciences World Watch Institute. Asia is also home to the highest number of languages worldwide, followed by Africa and the Pacific.
Papua New Guinea and Indonesia contain the greatest number of languages with 820 and 742, respectively. They are followed by Nigeria with 516, India with 427, the US with 311 and Mexico, Cameroon, and Australia with less than 300 each.
Half of the world’s languages are spoken in only eight countries. With the exception of the top ten languages, which are being promoted and increasingly used, several of the world’s known languages, including about 427 from India, are in danger of becoming extinct because fewer people speak or communicate in it.
According to the report, Vital Signs, 2006-2007, linguists estimate 10,000 years ago there were approximately 5-10 million people on earth and up to 12,000 languages were spoken, while the current global population is more than 6 billion, yet the number of unique languages has shrunk to less than 7,000.
Some experts estimate that we lose one language every month, while others peg the loss at one every two weeks. At this rate, 100 years from now there could be only 2,500 languages left. Worse still, some experts maintain that 90 per cent of the world’s languages will vanish or be replaced by dominant languages by the end of this century.
Nearly 550 languages are spoken fluently by fewer than 100 people increasing the likelihood that they will disappear quickly. Of these, 516 are considered extinct, the report said. A language is classified as nearly extinct when the speaker population is fewer than 50 or when the number of speakers represents a very small fraction of an ethnic group. Fifty per cent of the world’s languages are losing speakers and 95 per cent of them are spoken by just six per cent of people worldwide. Only 347 languages, about five per cent of the total are spoken by more than a million people.
The death of a language is most commonly caused by bans on regional languages, infectious diseases, wars, migration and cultural assimilation. Sometimes, they disappear because their speakers voluntarily abandon them. When a community finds that its ability to survive and advance economically is impaired by the use of another language, for example, people stop using their native language or teaching it to their children.
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