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The world's languages in crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Michael Krauss
Michael Krauss*
Affiliation:
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
*
Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK 99775
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The Eyak language of Alaska now has two aged speakers; Mandan has 6, Osage 5, Abenaki-Penobscot 20, and Iowa has 5 fluent speakers. According to counts in 1977, already 13 years ago, Coeur d'Alene had fewer than 20, Tuscarora fewer than 30, Menomini fewer than 50, Yokuts fewer than 10. On and on this sad litany goes, and by no means only for Native North America. Sirenikski Eskimo has two speakers, Ainu is perhaps extinct. Ubykh, the Northwest Caucasian language with the most consonants, 80-some, is nearly extinct, with perhaps only one remaining speaker. Here we might be accused of jumping the gun, prematurely announcing the extinction of a language, since—as I heard somewhere—two or three more speakers of Ubykh had reportedly been found. But what difference does it make in human history that a language became extinct in 1999 instead of 1989? What difference does it make if the youngest speaker is 90 or in fact 9? Only 81 years in the date of the inevitable extinction of the language, a mere moment in human history— though a crucial moment for linguists today, as we shall see.

Information

Type
Endangered Languages
Information
Language , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 4 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 Except for the case of Eyak, which I can personally confirm, many of the statistics, large and small, in this article are but reports or estimates; I trust it will be obvious that any imprecision in the present figures should in no way detract from the basic point of their shocking significance. For North America and the Soviet North the figures for numbers of speakers come mainly from colleagues. For the numbers of languages and their speakers for the world generally, by far the best single source available that I am aware of is the Ethnologue (Grimes 1988), to which this paper refers below.

2 Note, however, that 187 languages comprise only a very small proportion of the world's languages, about 3%. For this and much of the following I am most indebted to Barbara and Joseph Grimes and their Ethnologue (1988), together with some late 1990 updates (personal communication). This work provides by far the most detailed worldwide survey of languages yet available, and it is also a project continuously being updated. In keeping with the estimated nature of statistics, I have generally rounded the Grimeses' figures.

3 The Grimeses' updated figures now include over 100 more very nearly extinct Australian languages listed in Wurm & Hattori 1981 but not in the 1988 Ethnologue.

4 Ken Hale wishes to point out that the figures attributed to him in Time magazine, September 23, 1991, are from Mike Krauss's presentation in the LSA Endangered Languages symposium of January, 1991.

5 As this goes to press, I note the article ‘World of the Living Dead’ (Natural history 9/91:30, 32–37) by the biologist Jared Diamond, who takes the Javanese bird situation as an example to illustrate his view, held by many biologists, that ‘half of the world's species will be extinct or on the verge of extinction by the end of the next century’. Thus the enormity of the impending biological catastrophe may come much closer to matching that of the linguistic catastrophe than one might believe from the official endangered species listings.

6 As this goes to press, in addition to the political support of the federal Native American Languages Act of 1990 (described below by Watahomigie & Yamamoto), new federal legislation is proceeding that is to include appropriations: S. 1595, the Alaska Native Languages Preservation and Enhancement Act of 1991, introduced by Senator Murkowski of Alaska in July, ‘to preserve and enhance the ability of Alaska Natives to speak and understand their native languages’, passed by the Senate in November; and S. 2044, the Native American Languages Act of 1991, ‘to assist Native Americans in assuring the survival and continuing vitality of their languages’, introduced by Senator Inouye of Hawaii in November.