Mythbusting: Monolingualism and Endangered Languages Martin Lee-Paterson, 1st Year: Mythbusting: Belief and Truths about Language At the LSA Endangered Languages symposium of January 1991, linguist Michael E. Krauss famously predicted that 90% of the world’s languages would be dead or doomed within a century (Hale et al., 1992). This grim prediction, if it comes to pass, will have wide-reaching consequences - the mass extinction of smaller languages would confine vast corpora of media and culture at best to the domain of experts, and at worst, for those languages without sufficient documentation, to obscurity.
Some years on from Krauss’s portent, his concerns appear well-founded. Harmon and Loh (2010) report that global linguistic diversity declined by 20% during the thirty-five year period spanning 1970 to 2005. Simons and Lewis (2011) find in their own response to Krauss that of even the languages still living, 19% are not being taught to children, putting them at risk. It is because of this that the position of languages with mainly multilingual speakers is of interest to so many. There are a variety of circumstances that can lead to a
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