National Geographic has a striking article on endangered languages around the world
“The Earth’s population of seven billion people speaks roughly 7,000 languages, a statistic that would seem to offer each living language a healthy one million speakers, if things were equitable. In language, as in life, things aren’t. Seventy-eight percent of the world’s population speaks the 85 largest languages, while the 3,500 smallest languages share a mere 8.25 million speakers. Thus, while English has 328 million first-language speakers, and Mandarin 845 million, Tuvan speakers in Russia number just 235,000. Within the next century, linguists think, nearly half of the world’s current stock of languages may disappear. More than a thousand are listed as critically or severely endangered—teetering on the edge of oblivion.”
In many cases, technology and globalization are leading the demise of many of these languages, but in The New Polymath, I had documented at least a few ways technology has helped many languages and scripts survive and thrive
- The keyboard and its cousins around the world are allowing for electronic scripting of all kinds of modern and ancient languages.The scripting is facilitated by a standard called Unicode. When it was first adopted in 1991, it supported 7,161 characters. In version 5.2, which came out in 2009, it supported 107,361 characters. That ’ s amazing progress in the last two decades. Unicode covers 90 scripts; the latest release supports 1,071 Egyptian hieroglyphs.
- The Qinghai - Tibet railway is the highest in the world and goes through some of the harshest terrains. It already has 80 percent mobile coverage and keeps expanding. The Chinese may be wary of Tibetan strife, but it has not stopped the development of a Tibetan - language user interface. (Few of the locals speak or write Mandarin, the official language.)
- Go to the Google home page and navigate via the “ Other ” menu option
to the Translate page. Now play around with different languages. Google
currently supports more than 50 languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. Arabic reads from right to left. Russia, Yugoslavia, Ukraine, and several other countries use the Cyrillic script, which has 21 consonants and 10 vowels. Hindi, spoken in India, is written in the Devanagari script; in it, if a vowel follows a consonant, the two characters are merged into one.
Comments