Why Conduct Qualitative Research?

Language and Linguistics
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This section of the course is about
language ... the vehicle for holding and
transmitting culture
We will cover the origins of human
language; the structure of language;
historical linguistics; sociolinguistics;
and the history of writing.
Language origins
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Evidence for the evolution of language comes
from anatomy – comparative anatomy of
modern humans and chimps and comparative
anatomy of hominids through time – and from
primate sign language, experiments in tool
making, and comparative linguistics.
The capacity for language, like the capacity for
culture, was part of biological evolution.
The capacity for language evolved
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We do not know much about the details of
language evolution but we do know that the
capacity for language, like the capacity for
culture, was part of biological evolution.
There have not been any hominids on Earth
except for H. sapiens for 40,000 years.
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That is probably how long it has been since the
currently observable human capacity for language
has been part of our repertoire.
On being primitive
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There are technologically primitive societies on Earth
– hunters and gatherers who never took part in the
Neolithic revolution, much less the preindustrial state
revolution or the industrial revolution or the postindustrial revolution now underway.
But there are no primitive people on Earth.
Humans have equal capacity for acquiring language.
All human languages ever known can transmit any
culture, even the most technologically complex.
Language and biology
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The evolution of language and the
development of the human hand and the
ability to make tools are probably all related.
The voice box and neurological complexity
have all evolved.
We know from endocranial casts that the area
of the brain devoted to speech began
developing as early as H. habilis.
Speech and handedness
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The speech area of the brain is adjacent to the area
devoted to the control of the human hand.
Oldowan tool makers were mostly right handed.
Chimps can make stone tools – they don’t do that in
the wild – but when they do in experiments in
captivity, they do not show any preference for rightor left handedness (Stanley Ambrose, Science 2001).
William Haviland points out that handedness is
associated with lateralization of the brain, as is
language.
Hypoglossal canal
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By half a million years ago, in H. erectus, we
see a major increase in the size of the
hypoglossal canal – which could
accommodate larger nerves for controlling
the tongue.
By the time we get to Neanderthals, the
hypoglossal canal is the same size as it is in
fully modern humans (though this is
controversial).
Hyoid bone and language
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U-shaped bone at the base of the tongue that
supports the tongue muscles.
In Neanderthals, the hyoid shows that the
larynx was as developed as that in modern
humans.
And the thorax had expanded to the same
size as that of modern humans: breath
control required for continual speech.
Washoe and other chimps
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Experiments with chimps and other apes
show they are capable of much more than we
thought, in terms of language.
Chimps do not have the physical apparatus
for human speech, but Beatrice and Allan
Gardner taught Washoe, a female chimp, 160
signs in Ameslan.
Generalizing signs
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Washoe moved beyond the signs and
generalized them – and combined them.
She learned “open” for one door, and then
used it to ask for other doors to be opened
She asked for refrigerators to be opened and
pointed to open drawers and briefcases.
Washoe and Lucy generalize
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Washoe and Lucy (trained by Roger Fouts)
generalized the sign for feces to mean dirty.
Lucy used the term as an expletive when she got
mad at Fouts for not giving her something.
Lucy invented “cry hurt food” for radishes, “water
bird” for swans, “candy fruit” for watermelons.
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Chimps and other great apes achieve the linguistic
capacity of a 2–3 year old human.
Comparative linguistics and
language origins
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Brent Berlin and Paul Kay studied 110
languages and found seven stages in the
development of color terms.
All languages have at least two terms, white
and black, or color and lack of color.
When languages acquire a third term, it is
always red.
When languages acquire a fourth term, it is
either green or yellow.
Berlin and Kay’s study
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At 5 terms, we get green or yellow,
depending on which entered at stage IV.
At 6 terms, blue enters, and at 7 terms,
brown enters.
At the final stage of 8 or more terms, purple,
pink, orange, gray or combinations of these
terms enter the lexicon.
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Moreover, color lexicons become more complex as
societies become more complex.
Brown and Witkowski’s study
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Replicated Berlin and Kay’s work on
color using names for organisms.
At stage I of lexical complexity for
organisms, there is a word for plant.
Next, languages distinguish trees from
all other plants.
Then grerb enters the lexicon – grass
and/or herb.
From bush to wug
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Then bush enters, and then grass, and the
vine.
In the animal kingdom, the simplest lexicons
distinguish animals from plants.
Then fish enter the lexicon, and then:
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Bird
Snake
wug (worm and bug)
Mammal
Complexity of the lexicon
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But complexity of the lexicon for organisms is
very plastic, as comparisons between urban
and primitive peoples shows.
People in small-scale societies can name from
400-800 plants.
In urban areas, this is just 40-80.
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And they recognize even fewer, as John Gatewood
showed in his research on loose talk.
Pidgins and creoles
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Recent studies of Pidgins and creoles also
shed light on the evolution of language.
Pidgin languages are always second
languages.
They develop when speakers of different
languages try to communicate, often for
purposes of trade.
The lexicon usually comes from one
language, and the grammar from the other.
Hawaiian Creole
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Creole languages develop from pidgins,
but as people develop native capacity in
a pidgin, the structure changes.
Hawaii is a good case. In the late 19th
century, Filipinos, Puerto-Ricans, AngloAmericans, Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
and American Blacks all came to work
on the plantations there.
Bickerton’s study
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Derek Bickerton studied Hawaiian Creole in
1975 when it was a fully developed language.
Compared the structural properties of
Hawaiian Creole to other creoles.
Found similarity in the use of particles for
modifying verb roots to produce tense, and
similarities in the use of singular, plural and
neutral number markers.
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Bickerton suggests that the similarities across
creoles are because of a genetic substrate in
humans.
This substrate produces basic structural
properties in languages at the early stage of
development.
Noam Chomsky referred to this as the
biological basis of the capacity for language
acquisition.
Language complexity and evolution
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Others now studying child languages across the
world to test whether this is true.
If it is, then the theory would be that the more
child-like a language, the easier it is to learn –
and the more like early language it must be.
But languages are getting simpler –English and
modern German from early German, Spanish,
Italian and French from Latin.
So the whole picture is not yet clear.
Children’s language acquisition
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12 - 13 months name objects
18 – 20 months one-word sentences
18 – 24 months two-word sentences
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The experiment at Washington State
University on language origins.
Structure of language
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We shift now to the structure of
language. There are two main
approaches:
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Immediate constituents approach –
Leonard Bloomfield
Transformational grammar approach –
Noam Chomsky
IC grammar
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Collect native utterances and build up the
grammar by discovering the parts.
This is still used in learning languages and in
understanding how any language works.
The person most responsible for the IC
approach was Leonard Bloomfield, a founder
of structural linguistics just after WW I.
Chomsky’s observation
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The IC approach doesn’t account for
the fact that humans can learn
languages or for the fact that languages
are generative
From a finite number of rules operating
on a finite number of words, we can
encode and decode an infinite number
of well-formed sentences.
Transformational-generative grammar
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TG grammar makes it possible to
understand language play.
It makes understandable the fact that
sentences can have many meanings –
because they are similar surface
representations of different roots.
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Flying planes can be dangerous.
I don’t like John’s cooking.
Four parts of grammar
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Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Semantics
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The phonological rules are acquired first,
and are the most difficult rules to acquire
in a second language after childhood.
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We’ll see this in the Kissinger effect later.
Writing is not the same as language
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Language is an ideal concept, like race,
and only exists in the surface
representations.
Speech and writing are different surface
representations of language, and
writing is not a better representation
than speech.
Writing
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Writing is associated with the development of
trade in the context of the state, but not all
states develop writing.
Present at Uruk, in SW Iran, around 5500ya.
The system began with many symbols and
became reduced over a period of 400 years.
Writing invented independently at least twice
in the world.
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It may have been invented three times in the
Old World: In the Indus Valley, in the Middle
East, and in China
May have been an example of stimulus
diffusion from the Middle East to the other
Old World centers of ancient civilization.
Writing was invented independently in the
New World.
English phonology
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English has 46 phonemes and many allophones.
We discover the phonemes of a language by
looking for short, minimal pairs, like pig/big in
English to isolate distinctive features.
Here we see that voicing is the distinctive feature
because p and b are both bilabial stops, but only
one is voiced.
In English, we have stops, fricatives, affricates,
nasals, and liquids.
Phonemes and allophones
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A phoneme is a set of similar sounds
which native speakers of a language
think of as being alike.
Allophones are the members of the set,
like English, [p] and [ph], in poke and
spoke, tough and stuff.
Recall the concept of an allele – an
alternative expression of a gene.
The vocal apparatus
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We make these various sounds by
regulating our breath and parts of our
vocal apparatus.
The apparatus is capable of making all
sounds in all languages, but each
language has a subset of the possible
sounds.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2003/ling001/lecture4.html
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2003/ling001/lecture4.html
Voiceless stops
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Stops, or plosives, are made by forming the
mouth and tongue in a particular way and
forcing the air to stop temporarily on the way
out of the mouth during speech.
The letters p, t, and k represent the three
common voiceless stops in English.
The p sound is a bilabial stop
The t sound is an apico-dental stop
The k sound is a velar stop
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2003/ling001/lecture4.html
Voiced stops
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Each voiceless stop has its voiced counterpart
in English, so we have
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p, t, k
b, d, g
Note the meaningful differences between the
words ten and den, pig and big, cut and gut,
curl and girl.
The difference is the single, distinctive feature
of voicing.
More on allophones
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The t sound has several allophones in
English.
Word initial, before a vowel, the t sound
is heavily aspirated.
Put your hand up to your mouth and
say “torrid tango.”
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Say “itty bitty” – the t in the middle of each
word has no aspiration. Word medially and
intervocalically, the t sound is unaspirated.
Native speakers of English find it hard to
make a word-initial, prevocalic, unaspirated t
– like the t in “patter.”
Native speakers of Spanish use this sound
incorrectly in English, especially when its and
word initial and prevocalic.
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Spanish simply has no aspirated t.
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But English speakers use the t sound
incorrectly in Spanish – English has no
word-initial, prevocalic unaspirated
stops.
taco and thaco
But note that Taco Bell is English, not
Spanish, so Thaco Bell is incorrect.
Affricates
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The word “saturate” has an affricate in it for
many dialects of American English.
An affricate is a combination of a stop and a
fricative, a /t/ and a /sh/, in this case.
One of the allophones of /t/ is /ch/ – when
followed by the glide sound /y/ and the vowel
sound /u/ – as in satch-yur-ate.
Some people say “matoor,” dropping the glide
before the /u/, and thus converting the phoneme
/t/ to its prevocalic aspirated allophone.
Dialect allophones
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British dialects of English don’t have the
ch allophone for t at all.
They say matyoor, separating the glide
and the u vowel and adopting the
prevocalic aspirated allophone for t.
English phonology
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The phonology of the grammar comprises the
rules for the sounds of the language – which
sounds can be made, and how the sounds
can occur in various positions in words.
We have 46 phonemes in American English,
including 11 vowels in most dialects of
American English.
Sleek hawk – high-front to low-back vowels
Front
High
Mid
Central
Back
i
u
I
U
e
o
b
]
Low
æ
a
The ten vowels of English
I see
v sit
e set
æ cat
a hot
] saw
o sew
U put
u ooze
b
sofa
Diphthongs
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Many Americans have nine, rather than ten
vowels.
cot and caught
marry, merry, Mary
There are only six squiggles to represent the
ten vowels, plus four diphthongs:
say toy cow my
ei
oi
ao
ai
The Kissinger effect
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Why take you through these details of
phonology?
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To show you how much you have to learn in order
to become a native speaker of a language.
No one has a better vocabulary or a better
command of the syntax and the semantics of
English than Henry Kissinger does.
But Kissinger came to the U.S. when he was
15 years old, by which time, his phonology
was locked into German.
Morphology
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Morphology comprises the rules of the
grammar for constructing meaningful chunks
of sounds.
A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning
in a language.
Bound and unbound morphemes.
-un is a bound morpheme with many
allomorphs
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illegal
il
immaterial
im
inactive
in
ignoble
ig
Past tense and plural nouns in English
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Plural
s
part parts
Past
t
slip slipped
z
bag bags
Əz
rose roses
d
Əd
bag bagged want wanted
What rules govern these transformations?
Sociolinguistics
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Language and gender
The use of honorifics and hedging in
speech
Some language, like Japanese, have
quite strong rules about how men and
women should speak.
Gendered speech in Japanese
yamada ga musuko to syokuzi o tanosinda
yamada
son
dinner
enjoyed
yamada-san ga musuko-san to o-syokuzi o tanosim-are-ta
yamada-HON
son-HON
HON-dinner enjoyed-HON
Both sentences mean "Yamada enjoyed dinner with his son."
Bonvillain, Nancy. 2000. Language, culture, and communication: the meaning of
messages. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ : Prentice Hall, 2000.
Gendered registers
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Women in the U.S. use question mode
for declarative statements as part of a
softening, or hedging speech register.
Men also use softening modes, but in
different situations.
It remains to be seen whether the
amount of softening differs between
men and women.
Sociolinguistics – dialects
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Social status marked by language
Labov’s study of the r in “fourth floor”
at Klein’s (20%), Macy’s (51%) and
Sak’s Fifth Avenue (62%)
Code switching and dialects
Ebonics is a dialect of English
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
language and thought
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We know that we can say things in one
language that we can’t in another.
But we also know that translation is
possible.
Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin
Lee Whorf, hypothesized that we think the
way we think because of our language.
Verbs and thought
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For example, there are two verbs for “to be”
in Spanish, depending on whether a
phenomenon is transitory or permanent.
There are two verb forms in Turkish,
depending on whether one knows the action
or knows about the action.
Verbs in Navajo are marked for the shape of
the object spoken about.
SVO (English), SOV (Japanese), VSO (Welsh).
Is the S/W hypothesis correct?
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Spanish and German require that the speaker
categorize everyone as familiar or not. What
does all this do to our everyday thinking?
Sapir said that “Human beings...are very
much at the mercy of the particular language
which has become the medium of expression
for their society” (1929).
This is the strong form of linguistic
determinism, which is not accepted.
The weak form of linguistic relativity
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Variations in language structure do
structure thought, but we do not know
how much.
In Israel, the U.S., and Finland, children
incorporate gender roles at different ages.
The languages of these countries have
correspondingly different levels of gender
labeling.
Historical linguistics
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Lexicostatistics and glottochronology: based
on the idea that the core vocabulary of
languages is changes at a constant rate –
about 14% per 1000 years.
Morris Swadesh showed that this was moreor-less the case for many written languages.
The claim is that, with caution, we can use
this to examine the evolution of nonwritten
languages.
Lexicostatistics
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Based on the systematic comparison of
cognates across languages to determine
the times since two languages
separated from a common ancestor.
English
Swedish
blood
hand
father
sister
hail
hut
death
birch
wind
door
blod
hand
fader
syster
hagel
hydda
dod
bjork
vind
dorr
Dutch
bloed
hand
vader
zuster
hagel
hut
dood
berk
wind
dour
German
blut
hand
vater
schwester
hagel
hütte
tod
birke
wind
tür
Reconstructing preliterate languages
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We use these principles to reconstruct
languages that do not have writing
Fox
pematesiwa
niyawi
posiwa
he lives
my body
he embarks
Cree
pematesiw
niyaw
posiw
Menomeni
pematesew
neyaw
posew
Ojibwa
pimatisi
niyaw
pisi
1066 and all that
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beef
cattle
pork
pig
mutton
sheep
venison deer
chicken chicken
dine, cogitate, endeavor, acquire, read, thing,
build, want, sad, big
defecate, copulate, urinate, expectorate
garbage and target
When did we get these words?
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village
garage
collage
Indo-European language sub-families
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Indo-Iranian
Italic
Germanic
Celtic
Baltic
Slavic
Albanian
Greek language
Armenian language
Thracian
Dacian
Phrygian
Anatolian
Tocharian
Germanic
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German, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans,
English, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish
German: Bavarian, Swabian, Alsatian,
Cimbrian, Rimella, Reinfrankisch,
Pennsylvania, Luxembourgeois, Swiss
German, Yiddish
Italic
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Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Ladino,
Asturian, Aragonese, Catalan,
Valencian, French, Wallon, Jerais,
Poitevain, Piccard, Occitan,
Lengadocian, Gascon, Auvergnat,
Limosin, Franco-Provencal, Rumantsch,
Sursilvan, Fiulian, Ladin, Italian (and all
its variants), Rumanian, Sardinian
Language
Spoken as a first language by
1st Mandarin Chinese
905,000,000
2nd Hindi
379,000,000
3rd English/Spanish
353,000,000
5th Portuguese
6th Bengali
7th Russian
8th Japanese
9th German
10th Korean/French
166,000,000
214,000,000
173,000,000
130,000,000
103,000,000
81,000,000
Source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
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Note, however, that 150m people speak
Russian as a second language.
French and English are spoken as second
languages by 50-75m people each.
Malay-Indonesian, French, Urdu, Punjabi,
Korean, Telegu, Tamil, Marathi, Italian,
Cantonese round out the top 20 and are
spoken by at least 25m each.
The vanishing languages
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5% of the world’s languages are spoken
by 95% of the world’s people
95% of the world’s languages are
spoken by 5% of the world’s people
A few facts about vanishing languages
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Of 220 Indian languages still spoken in
Mexico, 17 are nearing extinction.
Of the 168 American Indian languages
listed for the United States, 71 are
extinct or soon will be.
Breton probably had 1.4m speakers in
1900. It is now down to perhaps 400k
speakers.
The case of Navaho
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Navajo was down to fewer than 5000
speakers in the 19th century. It made a
dramatic comeback and had over
100,000 speakers in the 1970s.
Now, it too, may be headed for
extinction, even though it is said to
have over 150k speakers.
What’s the problem?
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One could argue that language die-off
is just part of natural evolution.
The language of Cesar is not spoken
today, and the language is Jesus is
spoken by a few hundred speakers.
Nothing catastrophic seems to have
happened . . . Why worry now?
Language diversity and survival
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Language diversity did not cause the
evolutionary success of Homo sapiens.
Some fraction of human knowledge
however, is stored in the languages
remaining today.
Whatever that fraction is, can we afford
to lose it?
The language disappearance experiment
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I wouldn’t be so worried about the
mass extinction of languages if I had 20
or 30 planets on which to conduct this
experiment.
We do not know if it’s enough to rescue
knowledge rather than languages.
What’s being done?
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Anthropologists and linguists who are
concerned about language preservation
are helping to preserve and to vitalize
languages.

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