奇速英语

经济发展正导致一些语言的消失

Economic development is driving the extinction of some languages, scientists believe.

A study has found that minority languages in the most developed parts of the world, including North America, Europe and Australia, are most at threat.

The researchers say that efforts to protect these languages need to be focused on these areas. Tatsuya Amano, from the University of Cambridge, said: “World languages are now rapidly being lost. This is a very serious situation. We wanted to know how the extinction is distributed globally and what the main drivers of this are.”

The researchers found that the more successful a country was economically, the more rapidly its languages were being lost. They said that in North America, languages such as Upper Tanana, were now spoken by fewer than 25 people in Alaska, and were at risk of disappearing forever. In Europe, languages such as Ume Sami in Scandinavia or Auvergnat in France are fading fast.

Dr Amano said: “As economies develop, one language often comes to dominate a nation’s political and educational fields. People are forced to adopt the ruling language or risk being left out in the cold - economically and politically.”

The team also found that languages in the Himalayas are at risk, such as Bahing in Nepal, which has an estimated eight speakers. “These countries are experiencing rapid economic growth, so in the near future these languages will face risk of extinction,” said Dr Amano.

Daniel Kaufman of the Endangered Language Alliance, said: “Environmental factors have been overtaken by social, political and economic factors. We are now seeing a pattern of linguistic diversity that was originally shaped by the environment give way to a pattern that is being shaped by policy and economic realities.

“The environmental pattern at this point is largely historical consequences. We will no longer see areas of a particular environmental type lead to language variety. The economic influence is very obvious in that there are places within the language diversity ‘hotspots’ where whole villages are being emptied out due to out-migration.”