Endangered Language - Defining and Measuring Endangerment

Defining and Measuring Endangerment

While there is no definite threshold for identifying a language as endangered, three main criteria are used as guidelines:

1. The number and age of current speakers.
2. Whether the youngest generations are acquiring fluency in the language.

Many languages, for example some in Indonesia, have tens of thousands of speakers but are endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are shifting to using the national language ( e.g. Indonesian) in place of local languages. In contrast, a language with only 500 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the primary language of a community, and is the first (or only) spoken language of all children in that community.

Asserting that "Language diversity is essential to the human heritage," UNESCO's Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages offers this definition of an endangered language: "... when its speakers cease to use it, use it in an increasingly reduced number of communicative domains, and cease to pass it on from one generation to the next. That is, there are no new speakers, adults or children."

UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger categorises 2,500 languages into five levels of endangerment: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. More than 200 languages have become extinct around the world over the last three generations.

UNESCO distinguishes four levels of endangerment in languages, based on intergenerational transfer:

Vulnerable: Most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home).

Definitely endangered: Children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home.

Severely endangered: Language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves.

Critically endangered: The youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently.

Many scholars have devised techniques for determining whether languages are endangered. One of the earliest is GIDS (Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) proposed by Joshua Fishman in 1991. In 2011 an entire issue of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development devoted to the study of ethnolinguistic vitality, Vol. 32.2, 2011, with several authors presenting their own tools for measuring language vitality. A number of other published works on measuring language vitality have been published, prepared by authors with varying situations and applications in mind. r.