Endangered Words: Thousands of Languages Face Extinction

You're familiar with the regal symbols (bald eagle), adorable animals (panda bear), and even business controversies (spotted owl) that have connections to the word "endangered."

You probably haven't heard of Caddo, Hupa, and Menominee, and you may never hear of them again. They are languages that are still spoken -- for now -- in the United States, but they're on their own critically endangered list.

UNESCO launched on online atlas of endangered languages this year, and the U.N. education and culture agency says half the 6,700 languages spoken in the world today are in danger of disappearing this century. Consider that in the United States, there were about 280 languages spoken at the time of Christopher Columbus -- and in the past 500 years, we have lost 115.

"A language disappears when its speakers disappear or when they shift to speaking another language -- most often, a larger language used by a more powerful group," UNESCO says.

It's interesting to think of "endangered" and "powerful" in the same context. Our word "danger" came from the Middle English daunger, which referred to power, domination, and arrogance. (In Old French, danger referred to the absolute power of an overlord.)

Language is indeed power. As UNESCO notes, languages are threatened by external forces (military, economic, religious, cultural) and internal factors, "such as a community's negative attitude toward its own language." Migration and urbanization change traditional ways of life, which can yield pressure to speak the more dominant language.

In the United States, there are more than 70 languages in the atlas that are listed as critically endangered -- that means the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language only partially and infrequently.

You and I won't save Caddo, which has maybe two dozen speakers in Oklahoma. Same with Hupa, which has perhaps a dozen speakers on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in northwest California.

Menominee has only about three dozen speakers, but the namesake tribe in Wisconsin has 10 trained language instructors who teach in the tribe's schools, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. New generations are being exposed to a language that offers the elegant term aemeskwan in parallel to the English word "spoon."

Menominee is a rare language, but its story is common. Of perhaps 400 to 600 tribal languages that once existed, fewer than 200 are left -- with only about 20 spoken by all generations of a tribe, the head of the Indigenous Language Institute told the Journal Sentinel.

We have the luxury of not having to think much about English. Most of us learned it as a birthright of sorts, and it might be the only language we speak. Our recent ancestors may well have learned English as a second or third language, but through assimilation and the passing of time, their former tongues became foreign to us.

Even the Irish language, also known as Gaelic, is on UNESCO's list as "definitely endangered." It will survive into the next century, but if fewer than 50,000 fluent speakers remain -- down from a quarter-million less than a century ago -- then history one day might claim it.

It happened last year in our country. In January 2008, Marie Smith Jones died in Alaska, a few months shy of her 90th birthday. No one was left to speak the native Eyak language.

But she had helped the University of Alaska compile a dictionary of Eyak so that future generations could resurrect it. Now that's a legacy -- and a reminder that language, as part of our own history, is worth understanding, cherishing, and preserving.

Lewis F. Brissman, director of news production, writes occasional columns about words, language and newspapers -- and suggestions are welcome. Contact him at .