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languages is equally as problematic for the issue of language endangerment. Over one-quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than one thousand speakers, and just over half have fewer than ten thousand speakers, a level that puts them at an increased risk for extinction. 46 Crystal’s analysis of the Ethnologue finds over fifty languages with just one speaker, which, since language is by definition a communicative tool between people, are effectively dead already. In combination, the prevalence of dominant languages and the small number of indigenous languages explain the magnitude of the problem of language endangerment today. Another way to look at the competition between dominant and indigenous languages is to investigate which languages receive official recognition from states, as the lack of official recognition is a leading cause of language endangerment. Given the number of states and the number of languages, each state would need to recognize an average of thirty-two unique languages in order for all of the languages of the word to receive official status somewhere. The actual figures, however, fall well below this. The majority of states worldwide are unilingual, and no state comes close to this thirty-two-language mark; the countries with the most official languages are India, with twenty-two, and South Africa with eleven. Compounding the problem is that the dominant international languages are officially recognized in multiple states, increasing the number of indigenous languages without any recognition even further. English, for example, has official status in fortyfive countries, French in thirty, and Spanish and Arabic both in twenty; overall, these dominant languages have recognition in well over one hundred countries. 47 Looking beyond official recognition, one scholar found that English alone was a “significant” language, meaning either official or prominent for business, in about one hundred countries. 48 Instead of looking at the distinction between dominant and indigenous languages, we can examine the number of languages spoken on each continent and the percentage of those that are endangered. Such an analysis will allow us to determine on which regions the international community should focus its efforts when fighting language endangerment. The regions with the fewest languages are europe and the Middle East. Only 275 of the world’s languages (about 4%) have native speakers in Europe and the Middle east. 49 Most of the languages in these regions are relatively stable because of the history of powerful centralized governments, nation-states, and international trade, which have already weakened or eliminated a significant number of local languages, but there are still some endangered languages in the area. Approximately one thousand of the world’s languages (15%) are spoken in the Americas, with more than three-quarters of those concentrated in Latin America. 50 the situations for endangered languages are significantly different between North America and Latin America. In North America, only two indigenous languages are considered to be completely safe from endangerment over the next hundred years, Greenlandic inuit and eastern Canadian inuit, largely because these populations have remained isolated from the centers of political power. About 86% of the indigenous languages of North America are moribund, meaning that they are no longer spoken by the youngest generations. Most of these languages will become extinct in the subsequent century, including two-thirds of the indigenous languages of Canada in the next fifty years. 51 In Latin America, the situation is less bleak, with only 17% of Central American and 27% of South American languages considered moribund. 52 That said, there are still some instances of severe language loss in Latin America. Brazil, for example, still has over two hundred languages, but this figure 18 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design
The vast majority of languages have fewer than 100,000 speakers, which puts them at risk for extinction. is about one-sixth of the estimated number of languages in existence at the beginning of European settlement. uruguay has no indigenous languages left, as the entire native population has either been driven out or integrated into the white majority. 53 Africa provides another interesting case for the study of endangered languages. While the continent encompasses about two thousand, or 30%, of the world’s languages, 54 only about two hundred of these languages are in danger of extinction. this low number, relative to those of the other continents, is due primarily to the fact that the dominant european languages have not spread as extensively throughout Africa as they have through the rest of the world. Still, the causes of language endangerment still operate in Africa, just on a smaller scale. Minority language communities are slowly abandoning their mother tongues, especially in the countries with high numbers of languages, such as Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (over two hundred languages each), not for the internationally dominant European languages but for the local dominant native languages. 55 Because much of the economy of most African countries is still fairly regional, this process is moving more slowly than in many other parts of the world, but language endangerment is nevertheless still a problem in Africa. 56 The region hit the hardest by language endangerment in recent years has been Asia and the Pacific. Asian countries contain over two thousand languages, about one-third of the world’s total; the Pacific region is not far behind with about thirteen hundred, or 19% of the world’s languages. 57 the high number of languages in Asia and the Pacific means that many of them have a small population of speakers, which makes them especially susceptible to language endangerment. One country that exemplifies this problem is Papua New Guinea. With eight hundred languages, Papua New Guinea is home to more languages than any other nation in the world. Linguists cite the long period of settlement in the area, the isolated terrain due to mountains and islands, and the historical lack of centralized government as reasons for the multitude of languages in Papua New Guinea. Most of the languages of Papua New Guinea, however, have fewer than one thousand speakers, the vast majority of whom are usually centered around a single village. Some of these languages have 19 Melbourne Host Directorate PTY LTD | Office of Media and Design
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