Language: A Resource for Nature 139of the world’s linguistic diversity is carried by very small communities of indigen-
ous and minority people. These are the languages that have been and continue to
be under threat, due to the ever-growing assimilation pressures that promote incorp-
oration of their speakers into ‘mainstream’ society and the collective abandonment
of the native languages in favour of majority languages (a phenomenon known as
‘language shift’). Virtually all languages with 1000 speakers or less are threatened
in this sense, although even more widely spoken languages are fully susceptible to
the same pressures. Many of these smaller languages are already at risk of disap-
pearing due to a drastic reduction in the number of their speakers, with younger
generations decreasingly or no longer learning their language of heritage. Many
more have reached a stage of near extinction, with only a few elderly speakers left.
Statistics on ‘nearly extinct’ languages range between 6 and 11 per cent of the
currently spoken languages. In some projections, as many as 90 per cent of the
world’s languages may disappear during the course of the next century. These fig-
ures portray a threat to linguistic diversity that may be far greater and more immi-
nent than the threat facing biodiversity.
It is a historical fact that languages, like biological species, have undergone
extinction before. Informed guesses suggest that the peak of linguistic diversity on
Earth may have occurred at the beginning of the Neolithic (10,000 years Before
Present), at which time more than twice the current number of languages may
have been spoken. Population movements and political and economic expansion
Source: From Harmon (1995)^3
Figure 5.3 Languages with the most mother-tongue speakers: proportion of world
population