FACTBOX: Five "hot spots" for vanishing languages
(Reuters) - Linguists working to document rare human languages and prevent their extinction named five places on Tuesday where languages are disappearing the most quickly. Their Enduring Voices project is backed by National Geographic.
Following is a description of these five "hot spots."
NORTHERN AUSTRALIA
Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia are home to 153 languages. There are three known speakers of the Magati Ke language and three known speakers of the Yawuru language. Words in these imperiled languages include "barrkmulbardme," which means "hopping male Black Wallaroo" in Kune.
CENTRAL SOUTH AMERICA
The region running along the Andes Mountains and into the Amazon basin includes Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia, with 113 languages. The Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life but maintain a secret language full of information about medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science. Lengua, a language spoken in Paraguay, uses fingers and toes to count. "Eleven" is expressed as "arrived at the foot, one." "Twenty" means "finished the feet."
NORTH AMERICAN NORTHWEST PACIFIC PLATEAU
An estimated 54 indigenous languages are losing out to English in British Columbia in Canada and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon. Only one person now speaks Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon.
EASTERN SIBERIA
This region includes parts of Russia, China and Japan and has 23 languages. Government policies in the region have forced speakers of minority languages to use the dominant national and regional languages.
SOUTHWESTERN UNITED STATES
This region includes the U.S. states of Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico and has 40 languages. One American Indian language here is Yuchi, which may be unrelated to any other language. As of last count, there were only five elderly people who spoke it. The tribe shifted to speaking English early in the 20th century when its children were punished for speaking their native tongue at government boarding schools.
Source: Enduring Voices project
