Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

most widely spoken languages were Nahuatl of the
Aztec Empire and Quechua of the Inca Empire, and
small communities employed thousands of other
unique languages; over the course of two centuries
following the Spanish colonization, many of these
smaller languages became extinct, and the number
and prestige of Nahuatl and Quechua speakers
dropped significantly. 15 Originally, the Spanish
conquerors used Nahuatl or Quechua as a lingua
franca only for their colonial administration and
missionary work, but as more Spanish settlers came
to Latin America, Spanish gradually replaced these
indigenous languages in most public domains. 16
Invasion and colonization are often quickly
followed by the spread of disease, which can have
a deadly effect on a population and its languages.
Approximately 90% of the indigenous population
of the Americas died because of diseases that the
Europeans brought with them, most significantly
smallpox; the death of the vast majority of the
indigenous population was accompanied by a
drastic drop in the speakers of all of the native
languages and the disappearance of many language
communities. 17 While no longer accompanied by
colonization, the spread of disease remains a major
threat to the existence of many minority languages
today. The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, for example,
disproportionately affects minority populations,
many of whom have their own languages. In Nigeria,
many of the smallest of the 470 languages have seen
a drop in the number of speakers in the past thirty
years because of deaths related to the HIV virus. 18
types of natural disasters that can lead to
language endangerment and death include those
that kill speakers and force a population to relocate
such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and famine. The
Irish potato famine of the 1840s caused the death or
emigration of about one-quarter of the population,
the majority of which came from rural areas where
Irish was more commonly spoken. A similar situation
may be occurring in Sudan today, where the ongoing
famine is threatening the population of about fifteen
languages that have fewer than one thousand
speakers. 19 On 17 July 1998, an earthquake in the
mountains of Papua New Guinea, a country known
throughout the linguistic community for its bounty of
indigenous languages, killed over 2,200 rural villagers
and displaced more than ten thousand. These victims
came primarily from four small language communities,
and as they have relocated to other locations, these
languages have undergone a drastic reduction in
the number of speakers. 20 As evident from these
examples, the effects of natural disasters on language
endangerment are closely related to other factors
like urbanization and economic opportunity, further
discussed below.
Finally, the spread of religion has also been a
factor that has historically led to the extinction or
endangerment of certain languages. the spread of
islam throughout the Middle east and North Africa,
for example, replaced a number of ancient languages,
like Aramaic, Coptic, and Berber with Arabic, which
remains the predominant language across the region.
While the invasion and colonization of Muslim raiders
contributed to this phenomenon, the spread of Arabic
was accomplished primarily through the conversion
of local populations to islam. 21 the endangerment of
languages via the spread of religion also occurred in
many european colonies, where, after gaining their
first converts through the indigenous languages,
missionaries proceeded to convince the native
populations to switch to the european language that
they felt was better suited for the study of Western
religion.
Modern Factors
A major cause of language endangerment in modern
times is an attitude among most states favoring the
use of one or a small number of official languages. This
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