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In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the US south-west, many native languages are endangered in South America - Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia - as well as the area including British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon. Losing languages means losing knowledge, says K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College. " have="">That means, if the last speaker of many of these vanished tomorrow, the language would be lost because there is no dictionary, no literature, no text of any kind, he said.
Prof Harrison is associate director of the Living Tongues Institute. He and institute director Gregory D.S. Anderson analszed the top regions for disappearing languages.
Anderson said languages become endangered when a community decides that its language is an impediment. The children may be first to do this, he explained, realising that other more widely spoken languages are more useful.
Prof Harrison said that the 83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80 per cent of the world's population while the 3,500 smallest languages account for just 0.2 per cent of the world's people. Languages are more endangered than plant and animal species, he said.
The hot spots listed at Tuesday's briefing:
- Northern Australia, 153 languages.
- Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia, 113 languages.
- North-west Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and the states of Washington and Oregon in the US, 54 languages.
- Eastern Siberian Russia, China, Japan, 23 languages.
- Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, 40 languages. -- AP
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