Welcome to the Endangered Languages Subject Guide. This guide highlights some of the many resources that are available to assist you in your researches on Endangered Languages.
What is an endangered language? There is surprisingly little consensus, even in the terms which are used to discuss them. One may also find references to dying languages, vanishing languages, language obsolescence, and language attrition. In addition, anthropological linguistics is often used to discuss linguistic minorities.
In the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) document Language Vitality and Endangerment (2003), nine criteria are listed for determining a language's vitality:
At the same time, these criteria are not absolute. A vital language may have a relatively small number of speakers, and a language with a large number of speakers may be at risk of being diluted to the point of non-recognition. In On the Death and Life of Languages, Claude Hagege recognizes this, stating that "languages accompany human groups. They disappear with them; or, on the contrary, if those groups are large and quick to spread beyond their original environment, the languages can be dispersed, in their wake, over vast territories" (p. 3).
Note: since approximately 2000, the term Sleeping language has been used to indicate a language that has no fluent speakers but that can be revived through revitalization efforts. It should be noted that the possibility for revitalization does not make a language any the less endangered. (For a fuller discussion, see such works as Wesley Y Leonard. “When Is an ‘Extinct Language’ Not Extinct?: Miami, a Formerly Sleeping Language.” Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties, edited by Kendall A. King et al., Georgetown University Press, 2008, pp. 23–34.)
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