Vic: Ninety per cent of languages set to vanish
MELBOURNE, Aug 13 AAP - Up to 90 per cent of the world's estimated 5,000 languageswere likely to disappear before the end of the century, a Melbourne public lecture heardtoday.
Speaking at Melbourne's La Trobe University, American linguist Marianne Mithun saidthe disappearance of ethnic groups, educational missionaries and more recently the massmedia had all contributed to the death of thousands of international languages.
Considered North America's foremost expert on indigenous American and Canadian languages,Prof Mithun said with the loss of language also went important insights into the livesof its speakers.
"Language is the core of your culture - it codifies the kind of concepts people feltwere noteworthy," she said.
Language could indicate much about a community's environment and culture, Prof Mithun said.
"In Central Alaskan Yup'ik Eskimo there's a suffix that means `to be cold in the ...'," she said.
"You add the word that means ears and it means to have cold ears," she explained.
She said North America had lost approximately half of its 300 languages since European arrival.
"By the end of this century we will be lucky if we have a dozen left," she said.
One way to ensure the survival of language was recognising that people could be multilingual,Prof Mithun said.
"If you hang onto your traditional language it doesn't mean you can't learn English,and often people who are bilingual are more proficient in both their languages than monolingualpeople."
AAP clm/dk/apm/jlw
KEYWORD: LANGUAGE
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