World Languages Threatened
Many world languages may become extinct due to economic growth, a new study suggests. A study led by Tatsuya Amano at the University of Cambridge revealed that 25 percent of the world's languages are threatened. After identifying where the endangered languages were, the researchers looked for any environmental and social or economic factors those languages might have in common, such as rugged terrain(崎岖地形)or rapid population growth." We found that at the global scale, language speaker declines are strongly linked to economic growth—that is, declines are particularly occurring in economically developed regions, "Amano said.
"We showed that this is a global phenomenon, which I think is the most important in our findings, "Amano said. "" So economically developed countries with many languages, such as the United States and Australia, need immediate attention if their languages are to be conserved. "
Economic growth may endanger languages for a variety of reasons. For instance, speakers of endangered languages may view another more dominant language as offering economic opportunities and integration into mainstream society, and thus abandon their own languages.
There are other important factors that might endanger languages, the researchers said. For instance, policies regarding how languages are used and taught in schools" can be very different among countries and even within each country, and these factors may explain more detailed patterns in language endangerment, "Amano said. "But it was almost impossible to collect such information at the global scale for this study. This will be the next step for our project. ""
Amano suggested it could be possible to forecast future threats to linguistic diversity. "There exists detailed information on projected future changes in the environment, economies and climates, "Amano said. "Using such information, together with the findings of this study and further analysis, we would like to understand what will happen to the world's languages, where it will happen and which languages will be threatened in particular. "
