Bilingualism can check decline, extinction of languages
By ANIFriday, June 25, 2010
WASHINGTON - Spanish researchers claim to have found a way to check the decline and the ultimate extinction of languages.
There are about 6000 different languages in the world, but only a handful, including English, dominate.
Some mathematical models have demonstrated how dominating languages can cause the decline and extinction of less popular languages.
Such models seem to explain, for instance, the crushing of Scottish, Gaelic and Welsh by English.
But according to Dr Jorge Mira of the University of Santiago de Compostela and colleagues, this isn’t necessarily so.
They point out earlier mathematical models did not account for bilingualism, which allows two languages to co-evolve.
In their mathematical model, appearing on the pre-press website arXiv.org, Mira and colleagues found that two languages can co-exist if they are sufficiently similar and there is a stable group of bilingual speakers.
“[The results] suggest that the competition between two languages does not inevitably lead to the extinction of one of them,” ABC News quoted the researchers, as saying.
Australian linguist, Professor Nicholas Evans, from the Australian National University in Canberra also believes that bilingualism is key to the survival of non-dominant languages.
However, he does not agree with Mira and colleagues’ conclusion that languages have to be necessarily similar to coexist.
Evans says a language is more likely to survive when it has a “specialised domain of use” - in Hungary, for example, Latin was used as the language of officials.
Evans, who has authored the book Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us, says, “It’s important to have a clear context in which the choice of language is determined.”
He adds, “The biggest impediment to the survival of small languages is the monolingual culture.”
Evans says because large languages dominate the world economically, the speakers of those languages can afford to be monolingual, but he says monolingualism is a “historical aberration”. (ANI)
