Language Death and Disappearance: Causes and Circumstances

Abstract

Well over five thousand languages are known to exist or to have existed in the world, but hundreds of these are no longer living languages used by speakers and speech communities in their day-to-day activities and lives. Some of them lead a pseudolife as revered monuments of the past which still have some restricted and specialised roles to play today, such as Latin, Ancient Greek, Church Slavonic and others, but most of them are of interest and concern only to a small group of linguists, historians and some other experts who look at the past. Many languages have disappeared without being known to us in any great detail, with only some fragmentary materials in them - written or noted down by speakers or observers of them hundreds or even thousands of years ago - at our disposal to give us some idea as to what those languages were like. Others have disappeared without even that scanty information about their nature being available to us; only their names are known from historical records, or perhaps some remarks were written down by someone many years ago and were preserved over the ages to tell us something about some special features of such a language or such languages and who and what kind of people their speakers were. Many other languages, certainly a much larger number than the dead languages about which we know something, have disappeared without our knowing anything of or about them.

Retention and Attrition of Umbundu in São Tomé and Príncipe

“…Umbundu has its own set of grammatical prefixes, as shown in (5): (5a) Um u.kwenje wa.ove 2.child 2.2sg "your child" (Valente, 1964, p. 132) (5b) Um o.njo ya.nge eyi 4.house 4.1sg cl 4.this "This is my house" (Schadeberg, 1990, p. 20) According to Wurm (1991),…”

Reflexões sobre os empréstimos do tipo loanblend e direto na língua xerente akwén

“…As várias pesquisas e estudos têm dado suporte uns aos outros e isso tem se mostrado bastante significativo para um estudo mais verticalizado da língua xerente akwén. Em meu campo de estudo, já ciente da perda das línguas minoritárias no mundo (WURM, 1991;FISHMAN, 2000) e das tipologias sociolinguísticas que estavam sendo elaboradas para dar conta desse fenômeno, optei por trabalhar com as de Edwards (1992 ), e de Grenoble & Whaley (1998), pois elas enfocam a língua nas suas íntimas conexões com as macrovariáveis que a afetam, positiva ou negativamente.…”

Book Reviews

“…Many fellow Africans, however, consider linguistic diversity a hindrance to development and hence the death of languages is taken as a way out from the problems attached to that diversity. The creation of ethnic awareness among speakers of dying languages has been considered as the best mechanism for language revival (Wurm 1991). Whereas monolingualism is associated with socio-economic advancement and political stability, multilingualism, which is an African norm, is viewed as detrimental to any development agenda (see the contrastive study between linguistically homogeneous and linguistically heterogeneous nations by Fishman (1968)).…”