Editor's Column—The Fragility of Languages

Abstract

A FEW YEARS AGO, SEDUCED BY THE BRAVE NEW WORLD PROMISED by the Internet and digital libraries, I started collecting, or, more precisely, mining, data on dead, disappearing, and threatened languages.What I found was overwhelming and frightening.I'm not sure what came irst-the sense of being overwhelmed or the fear-nor was the source of either response clear.Was I overwhelmed and frightened by discovering that so many languages were disappearing at an alarming rate or by the weight of the data?For someone trained in a ield deined by poiēsis and aisthēsis, mining data is one thing; reading them is another proposition altogether.Seeking to understand the fragility of languages at the turn of the millennium, I would sit in front of massive databases, facing the evidence of the devastation wrought on the world linguistic map and trying to interpret my feelings.he UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger confronted me with the bleak reality of language endangerment measured in maps, graphs, and data sets (igs. 1 and 2). he facts are not hard to fathom.Siting the data, I discovered that at least fortythree percent of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken in the world ater 1950 are endangered, that 576 are critically endangered, that 528 are severely endangered, and that 231 are extinct.his information is conirmed by other sources.Ethnologue, one of the most authoritative publications on world languages, reports that since it started publication in 1950, 373 languages have died, a "rate of loss amounting to 6 languages per year" ("Endangered Languages").David Crystal, the eminent linguist, estimates that half of all languages Editor's ColumnThe Fragility of Languages

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