Back from the brink
Other countries are moving to save their languages.
By the end of this century, more than half of the world’s 7000 languages are expected to become extinct. According to the Catalogue of Endangered Languages, nearly 30 language families have disappeared since 1960. On average, a language dies every four months.
But languages have been saved from extinction. Although most of the estimated 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages in Australia have “gone to sleep”, according to one native speaker, indigenous languages have now been introduced to the New South Wales school curriculum and are increasingly being offered at tertiary level.
In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has committed his Government to a new Indigenous Languages Act to ensure the preservation, protection and revitalisation of First Nations, Métis and Inuit languages.
After nearly a century of being banned in public schools, the Hawaiian language is being taught at 19 language-immersion sites around the American state. Cornish, the language of the southwestern tip of England, is one of nine languages listed by Ethnologue reference guide to the world’s languages as “reawakening”.
Hebrew, although long used as a language of prayer, literature, commerce and scholarship, was not spoken as an everyday tongue for some 2000 years until revived by eager Zionists more than a century ago.