Confronting the Mass Extinction of Languages

We've come a long way in documenting the 90 per cent of languages facing extinction, but rescuing them is another story.

Who benefits from research? What if that research involves recording personal conversations among some of the world's most vulnerable communities? These are questions that linguists are asking today as they explore “documentary linguistics” – an emerging discipline concerned with endangered languages.

It is estimated that most of the world's languages – of which there are approximately 7,000 – will be “dead” within the next three generations. That is an extinction rate greater than the one faced by our planet's flora and fauna under the worst predictions for global warming.

Although languages are sometimes extinguished as a result of wars and natural disasters, the most common cause is a gradual decline over one or two generations as a language's communicative or symbolic value is undermined by the various effects of globalization, urbanization, political actions, educational policies, or population movements caused by economic and environmental pressures (including global warming).

Spurred into action by the imminent death of so many languages, linguists are now making concerted efforts to document them using techniques both new and old. While the movement has its roots in the work of pioneering linguists Edward Sapir and Franz Boas, who investigated North American languages early last century, the current escalation of activity and interest was triggered by a speech from linguist Michael Krauss in 1992. In this speech, Krauss warned that, “at the rate things are going, the coming century will see either the death or the doom of 90 per cent of mankind’s languages.” He went on to ask, “what are we linguists doing to prepare for this or to prevent this catastrophic destruction of the linguistic world?”

At this time, many linguists also wanted to roll back their discipline’s increasingly narrow focus on grammatical theory since the 1960s. This changing focus made linguistics look more like an outpost of mathematics or psychology than a humanistic discipline that could map out the diversity of human languages and what people use their languages for.

Finally, in the late 1990s, German linguist Nikolaus Himmelmann catalyzed the emergence of a new field called documentary linguistics, or language documentation. The efforts of this field were – at last – specifically directed at addressing language endangerment.

Documentary linguistics has few core principles, but, taken together, they represent a thorough departure from "mainstream" linguistics.

First, it is centred on data – real data – in the form of recordings of language in use. This includes conversations of all kinds, in normal, everyday social contexts, avoiding the distortions of staging and self-monitoring or other forms of corrective language use. In addition to conversations, linguists attempt to record the entire range of language events, from songs and rituals to the speech of children.

Second, language documenters want to "make sense" of the data, to ensure that their work resides not only in recordings of talk and song (valuable though they will be to the speakers themselves, of course), but also in ways to recast those recordings through transcriptions and interpretations so that others will have a window into their meanings.

Third, documentary linguistics has an ethical, participatory flavour: rather than re-enact the colonial, “we” study “them” research methods of the past, documenters work together with language speakers. Communities are recognized as partners in the enterprise and receive some of the benefits of the research.