Dr Tatsuya Amato, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, recently published a research study that showed that 25% of the world’s 7000 languages are threatened. As economic opportunities expand, Amato’s paper says, the temptation for small populations grows to abandon their native language in favor of the dominant regional language, so that they can ride the economic wave.
Amato and his colleagues used criteria defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature to measure the health of the world’s languages. The three primary risk factors for languages according to the team are small population size, small geographical habitat and population change or decline in speaker numbers. The team saw that per capital GDP levels were directly correlated to loss of language diversity. The greater the success of the regional economy, the faster the language declined.
“As economies develop, one language often comes to dominate a nation’s political and educational spheres. People are forced to adopt the dominant language or risk being left out in the cold – economically and politically. Of course everyone has the right to choose the language they speak, but preserving dying language is important to maintaining human cultural diversity in an increasingly globalized world,” said Amato.