Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages

If we trace the history of linguistics as a science, from the realms of mere speculation as recently as the eighteenth century to its status as a relatively exact science, with many distinct specialisations, at the beginning of the twenty-first, and compare that history with the history of demographic, political and economic change across the globe over the same brief period in the span of man’s existence as a speaking animal, then it begins to become clear why the concept of endangerment’ is so new to the realms of linguistics.
This volume arose as an answer to a felt need: to document a diversity that is fast attenuating, in a world where ‘diversity’ in other spheres – the natural world, the cultural world and even in race relations – is a quality which has enjoyed a heightened appreciation only within the past two generations or so.

Linguistics may be a relatively exact science now, but it is still very much a science whose object of study moves and changes more rapidly than its practitioners can follow it. It is also the science that is perhaps most closely bound up with the expression of human emotion, a science where the objective is in constant collision with the subjective. Everybody has an opinion about language to some extent, and except in purely monolingual societies, everybody is made aware at some point of externally imposed policies, other people’s prejudices, and an almost instinctive sense of ‘appropriateness’ about language use. Even monoglots are not free from the strictures imposed by society on their language use; they, too, must learn to graduate and refine
their use of the different registers within a language. In more fragmented language communities, dialect differences must be distinguished. Language is a badge of the individual’s place in the community.

There are well over 6,000 languages spoken in the world today. This is itself a fact that is only recently established by linguistic science, and there is some debate still about the exact number. Not only is the difference between a ‘language’ and a ‘dialect’ a perennial bone of contention, but even in the late twentieth century, new languages remained to be discovered, identified and classified – often misclassified, when the
data about them was only sketchy. Download the book here.