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Language Extinction / Endangered Languages

Lowlands Scots, or Lallans, is headed into oblivion. Not total, but eventually it will almost disappear.

There are some really odd vowel sounds appearing now on the streets of Scotland. Over in the east and Edinburgh, younger people are almost-never heard pronouncing the archetypical Scot 'abôôt', or 'nôô'....what's now being commonly-emitted by them is a weird extented "ah-ow" sound, as if they're slowly standing on a carpet tack.

I'm unsure if it's a creeping Anglification or something stranger.
 
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Here's the sad story of the Taushiro - a culture and a language now down to its last member / speaker ...

Thousands Once Spoke His Language in the Amazon. Now, He’s the Only One.
INTUTO, Peru — Amadeo García García rushed upriver in his canoe, slipping into the hidden, booby-trapped camp where his brother Juan lay dying.

Juan writhed in pain and shook uncontrollably as his fever rose, battling malaria. As Amadeo consoled him, the sick man muttered back in words that no one else on Earth still understood.

Je’intavea’, he said that sweltering day in 1999. I am so ill.

The words were Taushiro. A mystery to linguists and anthropologists alike, the language was spoken by a tribe that vanished into the jungles of the Amazon basin in Peru generations ago, hoping to save itself from the invaders whose weapons and diseases had brought it to the brink of extinction.

A bend on the “wild river,” as they called it, sheltered the two brothers and the other 15 remaining members of their tribe. The clan protected its tiny settlement with a ring of deep pits, expertly hidden by a thin cover of leaves and sticks. They kept packs of attack dogs to stop outsiders from coming near. Even by the end of the 20th century, few people had ever seen the Taushiro or heard their language beyond the occasional hunter, a few Christian missionaries and the armed rubber tappers who came at least twice to enslave the small tribe.

But in the end it was no use. Without rifles or medicine, they were dying off. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/world/americas/peru-amazon-the-end.html
 
The last fluent speaker.

Adapted from Emergence Magazine’s award-winning multimedia story, “Language Keepers,” this six-part podcast series explores the struggle for Indigenous language survival in California.

Two centuries ago, as many as 90 languages and 300 dialects were spoken in California; today, only half of these languages remain. In this series, delve into the current state of four Indigenous languages, which are among the most vulnerable in the world: Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu. Along this journey, we meet and learn from dedicated families and communities across the state who are working to revitalize their Native languages and cultures in order to pass them on to the next generation.

In episode two of the “Language Keepers” podcast series, we bring you to the redwood forests of Northern California, home to Loren Bommelyn, the sole remaining fluent speaker of the Tolowa Dee-ni’ language. Tolowa, like other Indigenous languages, is interwoven with the ecosystem where it came into being and thus holds the traditional ecological knowledge of the Tolowa people. Along with many Native communities, the Bommelyn family is grappling with what is at stake—for their children, for their culture, and for the land itself—if they lose their language. ...

https://lithub.com/language-keepers...fluent-speaker-of-the-tolowa-dee-ni-language/
 
Aruká Juma is dead, reports The New York Times — and with him, the culture knowledge of the indigenous Juma people of the Amazon.

Aruká Juma saw his Amazon tribe dwindle to just a handful of people during his lifetime.
Numbering an estimated 15,000 in the 18th century, they were ravaged over years by disease and successive massacres by rubber tappers, loggers and miners. An estimated 100 remained in 1943. A massacre in 1964 left only six, including Mr. Juma, who, like many Indigenous Brazilians, used his tribe's name as his surname.
In 1999, with the death of his brother-in-law, he became the last remaining Juma male. The tribe's extinction was assured.
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Mr. Juma, the last living speaker of his tribe's native tongue, died of COVID-19 on February 17.

https://boingboing.net/2021/03/30/covid-19-killed-the-last-man-of-an-indigenous-brazilian-tribe.html
 
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ramonmercado said:
Not really uncontacted but I think it fits here. If Mods feel otherwise then please move it to a more appropriate thread.

Aruká Juma is dead, reports The New York Times — and with him, the culture knowledge of the indigenous Juma people of the Amazon.


Mr. Juma, the last living speaker of his tribe's native tongue, died of COVID-19 on February 17.

https://boingboing.net/2021/03/30/covid-19-killed-the-last-man-of-an-indigenous-brazilian-tribe.html
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Reminds me of this poor chap - read about him when I was a child in a sort of children's encyclopedia given to my Dad as a school history prize, in 1922 IIRC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishi
 
The Uru people of Bolivia were pushed toward economic and cultural extinction when the lake that represented their entire livelihoods dried up (probably permanently). The fraction of the Uru population that remains is attempting to resurrect knowledge and use of their recently extinguished language in an attempt to preserve their culture.
Bolivia's 'People of the Water' try to survive loss of lake

For many generations, the homeland of the Uru people here wasn’t land at all: It was the brackish waters of Lake Poopo. ...

Now what was Bolivia’s second-largest lake is gone. It dried up about five years ago, victim of shrinking glaciers, water diversions for farming and contamination. Ponds reappear in places during the rainy season.

And the Uru of Lake Poopo are left clinging to its salt-crusted former shoreline in three small settlements, 635 people scrabbling for ways to make a living and struggling to save even their culture. ...

Not long before the lake was lost, the language of the Uru-Cholo had perished as well. The last native speakers gradually died and younger generations grew up schooled in Spanish and working in other, more common Indigenous languages, Aymara and Quechua. ...

To save their identities, the communities are trying to revive that language — or at least its closest sibling. Aided by the government and a local foundation, they have invited teachers from a related branch of the Uru, the Uru-Chipaya near the Chilean border to the west, to teach that tongue — one of 36 officially recognized Bolivian languages — to their children. ...
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FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/caribbea...rus-pandemic-8a33230cbeeb879c0f6f567421fac7f0
 
The biggest risk in letting indigenous languages become extinct may be the medical knowledge that will be lost.
The Global Extinction of Languages Is Threatening a Vital Type of Human KnowledgeCARLY

As human languages are driven to extinction around the world, a verbal encyclopedia of medical knowledge is on the brink of being forgotten.

Among 12,495 medicinal uses for plants in indigenous communities, new research has found over 75 percent of those plants are each tied to just one local language. If these unique words trickle out of use, so too may the knowledge they contain.

"Each indigenous language is therefore a unique reservoir of medicinal knowledge," researchers write, "a Rosetta stone for unraveling and conserving nature's contributions to people."

Language extinction is a tragic phenomenon that's been occurring worldwide ... Roughly one language ceases to be spoken every four months, and 3,054 languages are currently endangered around the world.

New research on indigenous languages in North America, Papua New Guinea, and the northwest Amazon reveals just how much crucial information could be lost as this occurs.

In fact, our collective knowledge of medicinal plants appears more threatened by the loss of indigenous voices than it is from environmental destruction.

Of all 3,597 medicinal plant species analyzed in the study, researchers found less than 5 percent are on the Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/langua...e-taking-unique-medicinal-knowledge-with-them
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract for the published report. The full report is accessible at the link below.

Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge
Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, Jordi Bascompte
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 2021, 118 (24) e2103683118
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103683118

Abstract
Over 30% of the 7,400 languages in the world will no longer be spoken by the end of the century. So far, however, our understanding of whether language extinction may result in the loss of linguistically unique knowledge remains limited. Here, we ask to what degree indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants is associated with individual languages and quantify how much indigenous knowledge may vanish as languages and plants go extinct. Focusing on three regions that have a high biocultural diversity, we show that over 75% of all 12,495 medicinal plant services are linguistically unique—i.e., only known to one language. Whereas most plant species associated with linguistically unique knowledge are not threatened, most languages that report linguistically unique knowledge are. Our finding of high uniqueness in indigenous knowledge and strong coupling with threatened languages suggests that language loss will be even more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than biodiversity loss.

SOURCE & FULL ARTICLE: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/24/e2103683118
 
Sign languages can be language systems unto themselves. They're not simply coding schemes for spoken languages. This CNN article describes one woman's efforts to preserve Hawaiian Sign Language (HSL) - a locally evolved sign language distinct from the prevalent ASL.
The fight to save Hawaii Sign Language from extinction

Linda Yuen Lambrecht stands in front of a webcam, with the space from her head to her hips -- her signing space -- perfectly centered in the frame; a white plumeria fastened above her left ear. On screen, three women look back at her.

"No American Sign Language [ASL]," Lambrecht reminds them with her hands, as the virtual class begins. "This is Hawaii Sign Language [HSL]."

More than 100 students have received the same reminder from Lambrecht. Since 2018, she's offered HSL classes to the public; first in-person and, since the Covid-19 pandemic began, on Zoom.

Lambrecht isn't just teaching. She's fighting erasure, globalization and the cruelty of time to keep an endangered sign language -- and with it, generations of history, heritage and wisdom -- alive.
But experts estimate that fluent HSL users number in the single digits. Time is running out. ...

There's evidence deaf Hawaiians had been communicating with a homegrown sign language for generations, predating the arrival of missionaries, sugar plantations and the Americans who would overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893.

But linguists didn't officially document the language until 2013, when research by the University of Hawaii found HSL to be a language isolate: born and bred on the Hawaiian Islands with no outside influence. More than 80 percent of its vocabulary bears no similarity to ASL.

The findings launched a three-year project to document what remained of HSL, led by Lambrecht and linguistics professor James "Woody" Woodward, who has spent the last 30 years studying and documenting sign languages throughout Asia.

By 2016, the team had built a video archive and developed a manuscript for an introductory HSL handbook and dictionary, featuring illustrations of Lambrecht demonstrating signs. But then, time was up: their grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme had run its course. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/08/amer...uage-extinction-as-equals-intl-cmd/index.html
 
EnolaGaia said:
The biggest risk in letting indigenous languages become extinct may be the medical knowledge that will be lost.

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/langua...e-taking-unique-medicinal-knowledge-with-them
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More on this topic.

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND—Uldarico Matapí Yucuna, 63, is often called the last shaman of the Matapi, an Indigenous group of fewer than 70 people living along the Mirití-Paraná River in the Colombian Amazon rainforest. His father was a shaman and taught him ancestral knowledge, including how to use plants to treat all kinds of maladies. But Uldarico rejects the title because instead of living with his people, for the past 30 years he has been in Bogotá documenting in writing what is left of this knowledge.

Once a nomadic people, in the 1980s the Matapi were forced to live on a reservation with five other ethnic groups, where traditions and language, already threatened by colonization, withered further. “We are losing the essence of our spiritual knowledge of medicinal plants,” says Uldarico, whose last name is that of his tribe. “A knowledge that cannot translate into other languages.”

A study presented at the 2022 World Biodiversity Forum here last week reveals that many Indigenous groups face Uldarico’s dilemma. By linking linguistic and biological information, the authors show that most Indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants is linked to threatened languages, and that language loss is an even greater danger to the survival of such knowledge than biodiversity loss. “Every time an Indigenous language dies, it's like a library is burning, but we don't see it because it's silent,” says study co-author Rodrigo Cámara Leret, a biologist at the University of Zürich (UZH).

Of the 7000 Indigenous languages still spoken, 40% are in danger of disappearing, according to the United Nations. And 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity is in Indigenous territories.

In the new study, researchers scoured the literature, including early records by colonizers, to map medicinal plant uses and Indigenous languages in three regions—North America, the northwestern Amazon, and New Guinea. They found about 12,000 medicinal uses for more than 3000 plants, known to people who speak 230 Indigenous languages in these regions. But more than 75% of this knowledge resides in only one of these languages. ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/medicinal-knowledge-vanishes-indigenous-languages-die
 
SmartSelect_20220901-214302_Samsung Internet.jpg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalmatian_language

I think I could guess the exact number of people 'with some knowledge of this language'.

Woof.
 
"Juana Maria", The Mystery Woman Stranded For 18 Years Off The Coast Of California

Juana Maria was stuck, almost entirely alone, on an island off the coast of California for around 18 years – and the reason, most likely, was sheer luck.

Not much is known for sure about Juana Maria – the woman remembered today as the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island. We don’t know what language she spoke, or what her original name was. We do know she was born toward the beginning of the 19th century – although we don’t know exactly which year – and we know she was a member of the Nicoleño tribe, from San Nicolas Island, in the Channel Islands territory of southern California.

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Why did she end up living alone for so long? Unlike the man of the hole, she wasn’t the last of her tribe – although she was one of the last. As a child, she would have been witness to a bloody massacre of her tribespeople at the hands of Native Alaskan otter hunters who had sailed from what was then Russian America to hunt for fur.

The Alaskans had lost one of their crewmembers, they said, to a Nicoleño murderer, prompting the killing spree in retribution. By the 1830s, there were only a handful of Nicoleños left – twenty or so at most, according to the recollections of the American frontiersman, explorer and bona fide “mountain man” George Nidever.

So, when a group of Franciscan friars from the mainland’s Mission Santa Barbara sent a schooner named Peor es Nada – literally, “Better than Nothing” – the Nicoleños left the island they’d called home for the last 10,000 years or so. Like so many displaced Americans through the centuries, they ended up in Los Angeles.

Except two of them. Juana Maria stayed behind, along with her young son – and nobody really knows why. Some said it was simply an accident; others that she had jumped off the boat and swum to shore after realizing her son hadn’t boarded.

“You can read where she had a child, you can read where she had two children, you can read where she mistakenly left the child behind, went back to get the child, and found that the child had been eaten by wild dogs, or you can find that she jumped off, swam back to shore, only to find that her child did get on the boat,” he explained. “[There are] so many different versions that it doesn’t really give you a whole lot of confidence that there’s any real truth to that.”

Whatever the reason, the pair were left on the island alone for the next 18 years – several boats returned over the years, but none ever found them. At some point, Juana Maria’s son, now an adult, was attacked by a shark or an orca off the coast of the island and died, leaving his mother alone, nearly 100 kilometers removed from her friends on the mainland.

Eventually, in 1853, Juana Maria was found. She was wearing a dress made of feathers that she had sewn together with sinew, and living in a house made from whale bones and rushes; she seems to have survived on seal fat and fish, and despite this resourcefulness she was immediately dubbed “the wild woman” of San Nicolas.

“The handicraft shown in the manufacture of her needles, sewing stuffs, baskets, water vessels – to make all of which a piece of the blade of an old knife seems to have been her only tool – is certainly curious,” reported the 3 November 1853 edition of the Marysville Daily Herald. “The water jugs are made of split sea-grass woven tightly together in flask form, and the bottom and part of the sides daubed over with asphaltum, springs of which are on the islands. She has a piece of netting made of sinews, some eight feet square, the knitting of which is precisely similar to that made for fishing.”

However, even once she had been taken to the mainland, her isolation continued. “No person has yet been found that can understand or speak her language,” the article noted.

The problem was that, although Los Angeles was home to many Indigenous people by the mid-19th century, the Nicoleño language seems to have been relatively unique – modern analyses based on the very few words we do know she used has placed it as living on the Takic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, similar to the Tongva and Tataviam languages that were once widespread across what is now Los Angeles County.

There seem to have been a few people around who were able to talk with Juana Maria, and she was well-known for her songs, but the details of what she said, and what language exactly she said it in, have been lost.

Unfortunately, life among others seems not to have agreed with her after near two decades of isolation. She was baptized in October 1853 – a rite we’ll never know if she actually agreed to – shortly before her death from dysentery in Santa Barbara, California. It had been just seven weeks since she left San Nicolas.

She may not have had a long time on the mainland of the new State of America, but accounts suggest she did at least have a good time.

“Apparently Lone Woman was quite happy,” Schwartz said. “She was brought into this whole new world; she would sing and dance quite a bit […] People would come and bring her little gifts, and of course these gifts had no value to her, so she would give them to all the little kids around the house.”

https://apple.news/Ayh_wb3aYTEKQMNBR3i5c0g

maximus otter
 
A linguist has spent many years preserving the old dialect of Sark of which there are only 3 native speakers left. It is an archaic Norman language. No examples given in the article though which is a bit rubbish.

One of Britain’s oldest languages has been recorded for posterity by a Czech linguist who has spent eight years working with its last three native speakers.

Sarkese is the Norman dialect of Sark, a Channel Island roughly 3.5 miles long by 1.5 miles wide with a population of around 500, located close to the coast of Normandy, France.
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But with just three native speakers remaining – Margaret Toms and Joyce Southern, both in their 80s, and 95-year-old Esther Perrée – it seemed inevitable that the Gallo-Romance language would soon be forgotten.

That was until Martin Neudörfl, a Czech linguist who first heard of the island while studying in the UK, decided to make it his mission to preserve Sarkese – also referred to as “patois” locally – for future generations.
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However, part of the problem with trying to teach the language to younger generations is that children on the Isle of Sark leave at 13 to go to school in Guernsey or on the UK mainland.

“When they come back they tend to have lost their touch with the language,” Mr Neudörfl explained.
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The linguist now visits the island once or twice a year for a month at a time, continuing to work with the native speakers and to teach his classes at the primary school.

Mr Neudörfl said it is important for communities to retain their native language so as not to lose their connection with their ancestors.


“A language is like a vessel for any culture and it’s the heart of the community, because you communicate through that language.

“It forms you, it forms your identity so for any community if there is a native language it’s important to preserve it so the people don’t lose their connection with the past,” he said.

He added: “At the same time, because Sarkese is a very archaic language, there are some features that we’ve lost in the other Gallo-Romance languages that we’ve retained in Sarkese.

“It also helps us to understand how similar languages worked – like old Norman and old French – and how they sounded.”
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/23/linguist-preserves-ancient-british-dialect-sarkese/

The Telegraph is paywalled but here is the MSN link as long as it lasts.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/ukne...S&cvid=c12debebd06d494eb614aa4501bfc363&ei=66
 
This page is a bit more helpful.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240221-sarkese-britains-archaic-norman-language

Some Sarkese words do resemble modern French. For example, "mérsî" is the Sarkese for "thank you" and similar to the French "merci" (although its pronunciation is different), but "mérsî ben dê fê" (Sarkese for "thank you very much") looks and sounds very different from "merci beaucoup".
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"There are so many vowels," Neudörfl explained. "In French, it's around 17, in Sarkese, it's around 50. That's why Sarkese is so, so difficult. One word can be pronounced three or four different ways." Its complexity also likely gave rise to the popular perception that it couldn't be written down.
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There are also two different dialects between Big Sark and Little Sark!
 
Ancient Greek dialect under threat

A new data crowd-sourcing platform aims to preserve the sound of Romeyka, an endangered millennia-old variety of Greek. Experts consider the language to be a linguistic goldmine and a living bridge to the ancient world.

The initiative, led by Professor Ioanna Sitaridou from the University of Cambridge, contributes to the UN's International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–32), which aims "to draw global attention on the critical situation of many indigenous languages and to mobilize stakeholders and resources for their preservation, revitalization and promotion."

Romeyka is thought to have only a couple of thousand native speakers left in Turkey's Trabzon region, but the precise number is hard to calculate especially because of the fact that there is also a large number of heritage speakers in the diaspora and the ongoing language shift to Turkish.

Romeyka does not have a writing system and has been transmitted only orally. Extensive contact with Turkish, the absence of support mechanisms to facilitate intergenerational transmission, socio-cultural stigma, and migration have all taken their toll on Romeyka. A high proportion of native speakers in Trabzon are over 65 years of age and fewer young people are learning the language.

The newly launched trilingual Crowdsourcing Romeyka platform invites members of the public from anywhere in the world to upload audio recordings of Romeyka being spoken. ...

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-chance-archaic-greek-language-extinction.html
 
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