 Scots Gaelic: On the Way Out
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Aug. 21, 2003 — Languages evolve and compete with each other much like plants and animals, but those driven to extinction are almost always tongues with a low social status, U.S. research shows.
The social status of a language is the most accurate way of predicting whether it will survive, argue researchers in a paper appearing in the journal Nature. They also suggest that active intervention to boost the status of rare and endangered languages can save them.
"Thousands of the world's languages are vanishing at an alarming rate, with 90 percent of them being expected to disappear with the current generation," warned Daniel Abrams and Steven Strogatz, both of Cornell University in New York.
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The pair have developed a simple mathematical model of language competition to explain how dialects such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Quechua — the most common surviving indigenous language in the Americas — have lost out to more dominant tongues.
The model is based on data they collected over time on the number of speakers of endangered languages in 42 regions of Peru, Scotland, Wales, Bolivia, Ireland and Alsaçe-Lorraine. All have been in steep decline over the past century or so, and the model suggests that Scottish Gaelic and Quechua will be close to extinct by about 2030.
Previous models of language dynamics have focused on the transmission and evolution of syntax, grammar or other structural properties of a language itself.
Yet by comparing various influences that help to explain the steadily declining numbers of speakers of each language, Abrams and Strogatz singled out status as the single most significant factor that could predict its extinction threat.
"Quechua, for example, still has many speakers in Huanuco, Peru," they note. "But its low status is driving a rapid shift to Spanish, which leads to an unfortunate situation in which a child cannot communicate with his or her grandparents."
A language's fate generally depends on both its number of speakers and its perceived status, the latter usually reflecting the social or economic opportunities afforded to its speakers, they said. When two languages are in competition, the one that offers the greatest opportunities to its speakers will usually prevail.
The researchers point out that bilingual societies do exist: "But the histories of countries where two languages coexist today generally involve split populations that lived without significant interaction, effectively in separate, monolingual societies. Only recently have these communities begun to mix, allowing language competition to begin."
They urged active intervention to slow the global rate of language decline, pointing out that their model also predicts that higher status will keep a language alive.
They also cite a real-life instance where this has happened: "The example of Québec French demonstrates that language decline can be slowed by strategies such as policy-making, education and advertising, in essence increasing an endangered language's status."
Similar measures may make a difference elsewhere, they argued.
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