LONDON: The linguistic equivalent of an ecological disaster is looming according to researchers from the University of Manchester, England, who say that 90 per cent of the world’s languages are likely to disappear by 2050.

One such tongue is Tofa, spoken by only about 60 people who herd reindeer and hunt sable on empty lands in central Siberia. The language is also spoken by the university’s Gregory Anderson. “I speak fluently enough to be able to express everything I want to say,” he said.

Academics from the linguistics department will stage an endangered languages day on Friday. They will play tapes and videos of native speakers and tell of their own researches and field trips across the globe to investigate languages ranging from Faroese (50,000 speakers) to Banawa, one of 300 languages spoken in the Amazon basin.

Yaron Matras, who speaks 13 languages, will play a recording of a British Romani speaker made in the 1950s. “British Romani is now almost at the level of extinction,” he said. “I’m still looking for the alleged four or five families in Wales who still speak it. I have been looking for some time.”

Dr Matras is also an expert on Domari, Low German, Yiddish, Neo-Aramaic and Frisian and has just published a grammatical sketch of Low German as spoken in East Frisia.

There is no shortage of languages: at the last count, there were about 6,000 — but four per cent of them are spoken by 96 per cent of the people. About ten languages, including English, Arabic and Hindi, are spoken by more than 100 million people each.

No one needs to worry about them. But the little languages with a chance of survival need help. “People are aware of threats to ecology and of species dying out,” said Nigel Vincent, professor of linguistics at the University of Manchester. “But they don’t realise that we are leaving languages to die out. A language can only survive if it is transmitted from parents to their children.

“If the youngest speakers of a language are in their forties, then the language will have gone when they die. When we lose a language, we lose something of the world’s diversity.

“Every language is the repository of the culture of the people who speak it. When you lose the last speaker, you lose the people’s cultural memory.”

Some languages can be given the kiss of life — Hebrew is a shining example — but the prospects for the south west British language of Cornish (which expired 200 years ago) do not look good, despite the efforts of contemporary revivalists.

Welsh has been given new life because parents wanted their children to speak it and to be educated in Welsh schools.

“If you live in a society where success can only be achieved through, say, Russian or English, it is not in parents’ interests to let their children speak anything other than the dominant language,” added Professor Vincent. “In some cases people can be said to be almost destroying their own languages.”

Size is not the only criterion for survival: 1.5 million people will say they speak Sardinian — but most choose to use Italian because it has a greater guarantee of social success.

Great literature is not always a help either: Irish, with a tradition ranging from early epics and verse to Peig Sayers and the other writers of Great Blaskett, is now confined to parts of Ireland’s western fringes.

Tofa, which has hardly ever been written down, has an oral tradition of epic poems, stories, proverbs and songs. When the last Tofa- speaking reindeer herder dies, that tradition will live on only on tape.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.