語言學家：多種語言正在消失

Many languages are endangered

When every known speaker of the language Amurdag gets together, there's still no one to talk to. Native Australian Charlie Mungulda is the only person alive known to speak that language, one of thousands around the world on the brink of extinction. From rural Australia to Siberia to Oklahoma, languages that embody the history and traditions of people are dying, researchers said Tuesday.

While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

Five hotspots where languages are most endangered were listed Tuesday in a briefing by the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and the National Geographic Society.

In addition to northern Australia, eastern Siberia and Oklahoma and the U.S. Southwest, 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.

"When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday."

As many as half of the current languages have never been written down, he estimated.

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.

即便所有會說Amurdag語的人聚在一起，也還是無人可交流。因爲澳大利亞土著居民查理•穆尼古爾答是世界上唯一會說這種語言的人。包括Amurdag語在內的全世界幾千種語言正瀕臨消失。有關研究人員於週二稱，從澳大利亞鄉村到西伯利亞，再到美國的俄克拉荷馬州，很多體現人類歷史和傳統的語言正在消失。

據語言學家們介紹，目前世界上約有7000種語言正在使用，而每兩個星期就有一種語言消失，語言學家們正在試圖挽救其中的一些語言。

週二，瀕危語言拯救研究所和國家地理學會在聯合發佈的一份簡報中公佈了五大語言瀕危重點地區。

除澳大利亞北部、東西伯利亞、俄克拉荷馬州以及美國西南部地區外，厄瓜多爾、哥倫比亞、祕魯、巴西和玻利維亞等南美洲地區以及英屬哥倫比亞、華盛頓州和俄勒岡等地區的多種土著語言也瀕臨消失。

斯沃斯莫爾學院語言學副教授K•大衛•哈里森說，失去語言意味着失去知識。

“我們失去一種語言，就意味着失去了人類好幾個世紀對於時間、季節、海洋生物、馴鹿、食用花卉、數學、風景、神話、音樂、未知事物以及日常生活的思考成果。”

據他估計，目前世界上多達一半的語言沒有文字記錄。

這意味着，如果最後一個會說這些語言的人明天消失了，這種語言也就消失了，因爲這些語言沒有任何相關的字典、文獻和文本的記錄。