Re: [idn] Re: language scripts classified

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine]

Soobok,

I was looking over an Indian list's traffic this morning and found this,
from the newpaper of record in Canada. The article understates a problem
with the residential school system, but that is another subject. It does
contain a useful newspaper-level survey of the state of languages in the
northern third of North America, and offer some numbers not found in the
Unicode Consortrum's compendium of things useful to printer vendors.

There are some surprising numbers.

Eric

Subject: Fw: Aboriginal languages to vanish, report says
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 12:33:18 -0700
...
http://www.globeandmail.com

------- Forwarded Message

The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, June 20, 2001

Aboriginal languages to vanish, report says

By Sean Fine


His people have entered the modern communications era with their own Web 
site -- but their language is on the brink of extinction.

"In everyday use it's already dead -- almost," said Kevin Littlelight, a 
council member of the Tsuu T'ina Nation, just southwest of Calgary,
referring to the aboriginal language known by the same name, Tsuu T'ina.
"A few people use it with their parents, the older people, but when those
people are gone, it will vanish."

At least half of the world's 6,800 languages, and perhaps as many as 90 
per cent, face a similar fate, according to the Worldwatch Institute.

It reports that half of all languages are spoken by fewer than 2,500 
people each.

In Canada, only three of 50 aboriginal languages -- Cree, Inuktitut and 
Ojibway -- have large enough populations to be considered safe. And only
about one in every four of the 800,000 people who claimed an aboriginal
identity in 1996 had an aboriginal language as their mother tongue, according
to Statistics Canada. Even fewer spoke it at home.

Not surprisingly, then, at least a dozen languages are in immediate peril, 
and 10 became extinct last century.

Around the world, war, natural disasters, the spread of more dominant 
languages such as Chinese, Russian and English, and government bans on
language have contributed to the death of mother tongues.

"In some ways, it's similar to what threatens species," said Payal Sampat, 
a Worldwatch researcher who wrote about the topic for the institute's
May-June magazine.

Tsuu T'ina means "a great number of people," but the reserve (also known 
as Sarcee) has just 1,250 residents.

Of those, 40 speak the language, which has three dialects.

Mr. Littlelight said the loss of his people's language has devastating 
implications.

It endangers "our ability to think as Sarcee people," he said.

"So then when we all become English-speaking natives, we sort of belong to
the Pan-American group -- it's just a generalization of an Indian. It's like
lumping all the fishes as a fish, rather than as salmon, trout, all the pike.
We lose that individuality."

The reserve holds language classes and workshops, and is putting together 
a topical dictionary full of everyday Tsuu T'ina terms. But Mr. Littlelight,
who speaks the language "at the kindergarten level," is not optimistic.

The language's future has already been undermined by the residential 
schools that "indoctrinated" his people in the use of English (many barred
the use of native languages), the proximity to English-speaking Calgary and
an internal struggle among the Tsuu T'ina over which dialect should be
taught.

"It starts at the top with leadership," he said.

New Zealand's Maoris have been a model for indigenous peoples in preserving
their mother tongue. For instance, they have set up "language nests" --
children's centres with elders who speak their first language to those whose
parents may have lost the language, said Arok Wolvengray, a professor of
Indian languages and linguistics at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College.

In Canada, some native groups, such as the Crees who live near James Bay 
in Quebec, are offering immersion training for children. At the Six Nations
Reserve in southern Ontario, about 500 children are enrolled in bilingual
schools teaching English-Cayuga or English-Mohawk.

"Each language has its own way of seeing the world, of dealing with the 
world," Prof. Wolvengray said. "When you lose a language, you lose that
knowledge base and that world view, and that impoverishes us a little bit."

He relates a story from the 1950s, told to him by his wife, a Cree, about 
a white boy who learned some Cree from his peers in a residential school.
In sympathy with his friends, who were not allowed to speak their language,
he spoke up in class in Cree -- only to be punished by someone placing a
tin wastebasket on his head, and then striking it.

"This shows the extremes they went to, to try and stomp out the language," 
he said of residential schools that were operated for much of this century
by Canadian churches and administered by the federal government.

Manners of speaking

Eight countries account for more than half of all languages: Papua New Guinea,
832 languages; Indonesia, 731; Nigeria, 515; India, 400; Mexico, Cameroon and
Australia, just under 300 each; and Brazil, 234.

The island of New Guinea, which Papua New Guinea shares with the Indonesian
state of Irian Jaya, is home to just 0.1 per cent of the world's population,
yet its residents speak one-sixth of all languages -- about 1,100 tongues.

More than 100 languages can be heard on the tiny archipelago of Vanuatu. It
is home to about 190,000 people.

India has 15 official languages, more than any other country.

The five most common first languages, and number of speakers: Mandarin Chinese,
885 million; Spanish, 332 million; English, 322 million; Arabic, 220 million;
Bengali, 189 million.

World of language

The following graph shows the percent of languages originating from 
different parts of the world.
Asian       32%
African     30%
Pacific     19%
American    15%
European     4%
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