Will 90% of the world’s languages cease to exist?

Posted On October 17, 2009By TranspanishIn English Language, Languages, Spanish Language, Tips for Translators, Translation Buyers/  2 Comments

A program in BBC radio reveals the following:

  • An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades.
  • In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world’s languages would have ceased to exist.
  • According to Ethnologue, a US organisation that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered.

What is lost when a language dies?

As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?

“What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people,” says French linguist Claude Hagege.

“It´s also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express.”

For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are a living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.

Cross words

The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?

One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argued that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers “have changed to points of no return”.

As cultures evolve, he argues, groups often naturally shift their language use. Asking them to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists’ sake than for the communities themselves.

Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis, however, argues that the stakes are much higher. Because of the close links between language and identity, if people begin to think of their language as useless, they see their identity as such as well.

This leads to social disruption, depression, suicide and drug use, he says. And as parents no longer transmit language to their children, the connection between children and grandparents is broken and traditional values are lost.

“There is a social and cultural ache that remains, where people for generations realize they have lost something,” he says.

What no-one disputes is that the demise of languages is not always the fault of worldwide languages like our own.

An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own choice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and that their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach them tribal languages.

Babbling away

Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Mouri in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink.

Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th century. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say “I love you” and “pass the salt” – the French linguists’ criteria for detecting life.

But with the “strong will” of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought back into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more.

Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language.

But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported by little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem insurmountable.

“You’ve got smallest, weakest, least resourced communities trying to address the problem. And the larger communities are largely unaware of it,” says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.

“We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because it is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation.”

Some Statistics

  • 6% of the worlds languages are spoken by 94% of the world’s population
  • The remaining 94% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the population
  • The largest single language by population is Mandarin (845 million speakers) followed by Spanish (329 million speakers) and English (328 million speakers).
  • 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people

SOURCE: Ethnologue

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Lunfardo: The Slang of Buenos Aires

Posted On October 6, 2009By TranspanishIn Languages, Latinos, Lunfardo, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation, Tips for Translators, Translation Buyers/  No Comments

Argentine Spanish is peppered with words and phrases from Lunfardo, a vast vocabulary developed on the streets of Buenos Aires in the second half of the 19th century.  Criminals and other shady characters looking to keep their activities under wraps developed Lunfardo by borrowing and twisting words from the melting pot of languages that surrounded them, allowing them to communicate with each other even in the presence of the police or prison guards.  While initially used by the more unsavory element of Argentine society, Lunfardo was later popularized through the tango, literary art forms, and upwardly mobile immigrants and has become a part of everyday, informal speech regardless of social class.  Today, the use of Lunfardo is most prevalent in Argentina (particularly in and around Buenos Aires) and Uruguay, though some elements have been adopted by neighboring countries such as Chile and Paraguay.

Lunfardo was largely a product of the great wave of European immigration to Argentina that took place from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s.  The huge influx of immigrants hailing from Spain, Italy and France, many of whom spoke non-standard regional dialects or languages, greatly influenced the development of Lunfardo.  Certain words also arrived via the gauchos from Argentina’s interior as well as from native groups like the Guaraní, Quechua and Mapuche.

One of the features of Lunfardo is the use of vesre, a form of wordplay that involves reversing the order of syllables in a word.  The term “vesre” is derived from the Spanish word “revés” (in reverse/backwards).  Examples of vesre include café → feca (coffee), pantalones → lompa (a truncated form of the word for pants) and hotel → telo (a pay-by-the-hour love motel).

In addition to vesre, Lunfardo also employs words based on metaphors such as tumbero, a slang term for “convict” that originates from the Spanish word “tumba” meaning grave.  Another example is the word “campana” (Spanish for “bell”), which describes the lookout man ready to sound the alarm should the police suddenly arrive on the scene.

For those of you looking to add a splash of color to your Spanish, the following website has compiled an extensive list of Lunfardo words and phrases: Diccionario de Lunfardo.

Some Lunfardo words added to our blog:

Meaning of “guita“

Lunfardo: Money Talk

Meaning of Atorrante

See also: Linguistic Features of Rioplatense (River Plate) Spanish

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The Contested Eñe: “Pure” and “Impure” Spanish

Posted On April 23, 2008By TranspanishIn Languages, Spanish Language, Spanish Translation, Tips for Translators, Translation Buyers/  No Comments

While written Spanish is rife with diacritical marks (a.k.a. accent marks), there is none as sexy and symbolic as the eñe. Take for example, the commonly used word, año (year). Remove the eñe, and you’re left with ano, which is the Spanish word for anus. In most cases, leaving out the accent won’t result in possible embarrassment, but there is currently a movement which posits that the use of accents online is critical to maintaining the integrity and purity of written Spanish.

The movement was borne out of the initiative of the Real Academia Española, which finds that with the spread of Internet use, online communications should be held to the same standards as written Spanish. La Academia Argentina de Letras and the Instituto Cervantes also back the campaign.

To this end, Internet domains originating in Spain can now be registered with Spanish’s beloved and emblematic ñ. Internet addresses registered in Spain will thus be more descriptive and possibly less misleading. For example, if one wants to register an organization called Campaña Para los Derechos Humanos (Campaign for Human Rights), they can now do so and keep their Internet domain faithful to the organization’s name. Previously, they’d have to omit the ñ from the address, and would be left with the potentially confusing campanaparalosderechoshumanos.com, which means “The Bell of Human Rights.” In examples such as this, one sees how critical the correct use of ñ becomes, as campana means bell and campaña means campaign or movement.

You may wonder: why is using accent marks so critical? Realize that this is mostly an academic movement of language purists. They maintain that the integrity of correctly written Spanish must be kept across all forms of written Spanish, even in the often informal and fast-paced medium of the Internet. Furthermore, the Campaña Pro-Eñe reminds us that accents in Spanish are not extra flourishes that we can choose to use or leave out as we wish, but are in fact necessary components of a correctly spelled word.

If accent marks are so critical in written Spanish, why are they often left out? Some reasons for their omission are:

• Efficiency, as inserting accent marks takes an extra moment and extra key strokes.

• Keyboards not specifically set up for writing in Spanish often make it difficult to quickly insert accents.

• Use of increasingly informal written Spanish, especially in online communications.

• Lack of knowledge about which words include accent marks, even for those educated in Spanish.

• Inability to adapt the Internet as a primarily English-speaking medium to the written conventions of Spanish.

• The different educational levels of Internet users, as many do not have the educational background to feel at ease with accent usage.

The movement to encourage correct accent mark usage on the Internet serves to combat the abovementioned reasons. However, only time will tell if this movement has the support and general interest to win over regular Internet users as well as academics.

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