The Handbook of Language and Globalization (Coupland/The Handbook of Language and Globalization) || The Global Politics of Language: Markets, Maintenance, Marginalization, or Murder?

✍ Scribed by Coupland, Nikolas

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 580 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 1405175818
• DOI: 10.1002/9781444324068.ch3

✦ Synopsis

Prospects for the World ' s Languages

Today ' s prospects for the maintenance and further development of all existing spoken and written languages and sign languages in the world have been estimated as bleak. The latest (16th) edition of Ethnologue , the world ' s most complete catalogue of languages, lists 6,909 " known living languages " on its website ( http://www.ethnologue.org/ ). 1 Most of the world ' s languages are very small in terms of numbers of speakers. UNESCO experts (see below) estimate that 96 percent of the world ' s languages are spoken by 4 percent of the world ' s population (see Skutnabb -Kangas 2000 , chapter 1 on numbers). The languages with the largest numbers of ' native ' speakers are today (Mandarin) Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, and English, in this order (see Ethnologue , and also resources at http:// www.terralingua.org ). At least some 4,500 of the world ' s spoken languages are indigenous (Oviedo and Maffi 2000 ).

UNESCO ' s Safeguarding Endangered Languages website ( www.unesco.org/ culture/en/endangeredlanguages ) estimates that " over 50 percent of some 6,700 languages spoken today are in danger of disappearing, " and that " [o]ne language disappears on average every two weeks. " Some of the facts that, UNESCO suggests, may be reasons for this disappearance are that 90 percent of the world ' s languages are not represented on the internet, and that 80 percent of African languages have no orthography. According to more pessimistic, but still realistic, estimates, there might be only 300 to 600 oral languages left in 2100 as unthreatened languages, transmitted by the parent generation to children (see Krauss 1992 ). These would probably include most of the languages that have more than

The Handbook of Language and Globalization

Edited by Nikolas Coupland