Published on 03 July 2012
Note: These are not so much reviews as notes I took after reading. In
some cases, they may even be notes merely to myself.
This was a very interesting paper that tackles the new Ethnologue coming
out in 2013, but more importantly, EGIDS, the Expanded Graded
Intergenerational Disruption Scale, a new way of classifying language
vitality. I was looking for this last week, and then I finally read the
paper, and now I can’t wait to see this used in the literature and to
help funding grants, and so on. EGIDS already came out in Lewis and
Simons 2010 (and is an extention of the Fishman scale, and UNESCO’s), but this based on the new Ethnologue - with some new figures. The most shocking of these is that Kraus 1992 may have been too dire! Most languages are not dying - only around 19% aren’t being passed on. This is of course, not good at all, but it is an improvement.
Some line item notes:
- ‘Statistics on language viability are very hard to come by’ (Krauss
1992:4)
- Fishman 1991 seems like a good book. Anyone read it? I need to get my
hands on it. Same with the UNESCO Experts Meeting on Safeguarding
Endangered Languages, Brenzinger et al. 2003. For that matter, also
Fishman 2001.
- Ethnicity is not necessarily always equated with a language
community, as the marking of EGIDS level 7 seems to imply.
- It is unclear what they did about Latin. Or, for that matter,
Volapük.
- Actually, what is the Na’vi one? I know we got our SIL code rejected
- lack of a literature - but sure, I can do that? Anyone want to work on making a corpus from a forum?
- Six official languages of the UN: Arabic, Chinese, English, French,
Russian, Spanish. What about German and Portuguese?
- Countries are not good determiners of language areas! I need to write
a paper on this. Anyone interested, let me know.
- ‘We have lost 15% of the linguistic stocks (the largest subgroups of
related languages that are reconstructable) that had at least one
living member in 1950.’ pg. 11
- ‘Alarmingly, 2,150 (29%) living languages all around the world are
currently at some stage in the process of language loss (EGIDS 6b-9).
That is more than the number of languages (1,863, 25%) that have
experienced enough language development (EGIDS 0-5) to rise about the
default stage of vigorous oral use (EGIDS 67a).’ p.11
- ‘Our findings show that Krauss’s estimate in 1992 that 50% of
languages were doomed or dying was too dire.’
- Who is Mufwene 2002? Oh.
- The Dari language colonisation was very different from the Russian
one. Using diglossia to compare them fails. Just a thought.
- How do we define language, anyway? (Is this a moot comment?)
- ‘A correlation analysis of the colonization patterns that were
typical of particular regions or countries with the profile of
current EGIDS estimates for the languages in each context could be done
to develop concrete evidence that support Mufwene’s hypothesis.’ Yes,
that could be done. and it should be.