Overview
An endangered language is a language spoken by a dwindling number of people and at risk of disappearing when it no longer has native speakers. Language endangerment is a process rather than a single event: as community use contracts across generations, a language may become moribund and eventually extinct. The term is used by linguists, community advocates and international organizations to describe varying degrees of risk.
Characteristics and causes
Languages become endangered for many reasons. Common factors include economic or political pressure to use a dominant language, forced assimilation, urban migration, intermarriage, changing patterns of education, and loss of community transmission. Other causes can be catastrophic events or policies that disrupt normal social life. Endangered languages often exhibit reduced domains of use, fewer children learning the language, and simplified registers among remaining speakers.
Consequences and importance
When a language declines, unique cultural knowledge, oral literature, place names, ecological knowledge and ways of thinking can be at risk. The loss affects identity and cultural continuity for communities and reduces the global diversity of linguistic structures available to researchers. Recovering or documenting a language can support cultural revival and educational autonomy.
Responses and revitalization
Efforts to address language endangerment include documentation (recordings, grammars, dictionaries), teaching programs, community immersion schools, and the use of media and technology to create new domains of use. Successful measures generally combine community leadership with support from linguists, educators and policy makers. Some communities report revival after sustained intergenerational programs, while others focus on preserving as much knowledge as possible before a language is no longer spoken.
Distinctions and further reading
- Levels of risk: terms such as "vulnerable," "endangered," "severely endangered," and "critically endangered" are used to describe different degrees of speaker loss.
- Extinction vs. dormancy: an extinct language has no living native speakers; a dormant language has no fluent native speakers but may have partial speakers or revival efforts.
- For definitions and classification schemes see relevant resources, and for discussions of language loss and disappearance see further background.