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An article in yesterday’s New York Times about a project of the Engangered Language Alliance to identify all the New Yorkers who speak dying languages prompted me to revisit Ethnologue, which has been collecting data on the living languages of the world for more than 50 years.  Ethnologue: Languages of the World, published by SIL International, is now in its 16th edition and provides a country-by-country survey of almost 7,000 languages. A free searchable Web version is also available.  

It is estimated that  3,000 languages are at risk of vanishing. Around 2,500 of these are documented in UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, the latest edition of which appeared last year. A rating scale identifies each language’s degree of “vitality”  from vulnerable to extinct. A free Web version can be searched by country or area, name, language identifier code, vitality level, and number of speakers. There is also an interactive atlas. It’s fascinating to explore this site and learn that, for example, there are eight endangered languages in Belgium; the country with the most endangered languages (196) is India; and 9 of 143 endangered languages in China are now extinct. Christopher Moseley, Editor-in-Chief of the UNESCO atlas, also edited Atlas of the World’s Languages and Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages, both published by Routledge in 2007.

The U.S. is the home of 191 at-risk languages. The recently-published Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and Native American Communities is an excellent example of a project to document language traditions. Although both Cajun and Louisiana Creole are considered by many to be endangered, I couldn’t find either one on the UNESCO list. This dictionary should help keep them alive.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Print Resources, Web Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.