Endangered Language - Causes

Causes

According to the Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, there are four main types of causes of language endangerment.

There are those causes that put the populations that speak the languages in physical danger, such as:

1. Natural disasters, famine, disease. An example of this is the languages spoken by the people of the Andaman Islands, who were seriously affected by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
2. War and genocide. Examples of this are the language(s) of the indigenous population of Tasmania who were wiped out by colonists, and many extinct and endangered languages of the Americas where indigenous peoples have been subjected to genocidal violence, or in the cases of the Miskito language in Nicaragua and the Mayan languages of Guatemala have been affected by civil war.

And there are those causes which prevent or discourage speakers from using a language, such as:

1. Political repression. This has frequently happened when nation-states working to promote a single national culture limit the opportunities for using minority languages in the public sphere, schools, the media, and elsewhere, sometimes even prohibiting them altogether. Sometimes ethnic groups are forcibly resettled, or children may be removed to be schooled away from home, or otherwise have their chances of cultural and linguistic continuity disrupted. This has happened in the case of many Native American and Australian languages, as well as European and Asian minority languages such as Breton or Alsatian in France and Kurdish in Turkey.
2. Cultural/political/economic marginalization/hegemony. This happens when political and economical power is closely tied to a particular language and culture so that there is a strong incentive for individuals to abandon their language (on behalf of themselves and their children) in favor of another more prestigious one. This frequently happens when indigenous populations, in order to achieve a higher social status, adopt the cultural and linguistic traits of a people who have come to dominate them through colonisation, conquest, or invasion; examples of this kind of endangerment are the Welsh language in Great Britain, and Ainu in Japan. This is the most common cause of language endangerment.

Sometimes more than one of these causes act at the same time, as poverty, disease and disasters often affect minority groups disproportionally, for example causing the dispersal of speaker populations and decreased survival rates for those who stay behind.

In addition, cultural hegemony may often arise not from domination or conquest but simply from increasing contact with a larger and more influential language community through better communications compared with the relative isolation of past centuries.