Page 23 - Summer 2021

FEATURED ARTICLE
Language Endangerment Threatens Phonetic Diversity
Ettien Koffi
Language Endangerment at a
Critical Point
A pandemic of linguicide has been decimating minority languages all over the world at an alarming rate. Its viru- lence has reached such a velocity that UNESCO (2003) projected that 90% of the world’s languages will be dead by the year 2100. Statistically speaking, according to McWorther (2003), “a language dies roughly every two weeks.” Currently, 2,923 of the world’s 7,111 languages are in serious stages of endangerment (Eberhard et al., 2019). The situation is so dire that the United Nations (UN) called attention to it by declaring 2019 the International Year of Endangered Language (IYIL 19). Now, the UN is taking an unprecedented step by declaring the decade from 2022 to 2032 the International Decade of Indig- enous Languages (IDIL 22-32; see bit.ly/39uudCv). This article highlights what language endangerment entails for phonetic diversity and what experts have done and are doing to stem the tide. It also highlights speech synthesis as a new model of language documentation that can help preserve phonetic diversity even if a critically endangered language breathes its last. Speech synthesis is a technique used so that smart devices can speak and understand lan- guage. Siri and Alexa are among the products of speech synthesis. More details are given in A Simpler Speech Synthesis Model.
Root Causes of Endangerment
There are several comorbidity factors that conspire to cause a language to die. Among them are genocides, epidemics, natural disasters, migration, urbanization, political/economic imperialism, population size, and the interruption of intergenerational language acqui- sition. For the sake of brevity, I focus only on the last three causes of endangerment. All things being equal, the smaller the number of people who speak a given language, the slimmer its chance of survival in the lin- guistic jungle where bigger languages eat smaller ones.
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https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2021.17.2.23
With regard to size, it is estimated that languages that are spoken by 5,000 people or less are in grave danger of extinction (Krauss, 1992). Nearly 40% of the world’s lan- guages fall into this category. In fact, Tucker and Wright (2020) estimate that 25% of them have fewer than 1,000 speakers. Indigenous languages also become endangered when their speakers find themselves under the political and economic rule of a dominant language (Mufwene and Vigoroux, 2008). Under such circumstances, minor- ity languages lose their marketability value, which means that any language that does not afford its speakers better chances for socioeconomic mobility is sooner or later abandoned for one that does. When this happens, par- ents no longer see any value in passing that language on to the next generation (Baugh, 2009; Koffi, 2012). Batibo (2009) and Sands (2017) among others contend that these aforementioned comorbidity factors are the ones that are pushing 2,923 indigenous language to the brink of extinc- tion. Figure 1 gives a visual display of the breadth and depth of language endangerment worldwide.
Figure 1. Map of endangered languages. Each red dot represents an endangered language. An interactive map with the names of each language is available at bit.ly/3ta9efO. Map used with permission, copyright © 2020 Ethnologue.
Volume 17, issue 2 | Summer 2021 • Acoustics Today 23