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CANBERRA, 20 April (Dialogue) There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world, and their grammar varies greatly. Linguists are interested in these differences because they tell us about our history, our cognitive abilities, and what it means to be human.
But this great diversity is threatened as more and more languages are not taught to children and fall asleep.
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In a new paper published in Science Advances, we present an extensive language grammar database called Grambank.
With this resource, we can answer many research questions about language and see how much grammatical diversity we might lose if the crisis doesn’t stop.
What we found was startling: we are losing language, we are losing linguistic diversity, and unless we do something about it, these windows into our collective history will close.
What is grammar?
The grammar of a language is the set of rules that determine what a sentence is and what is gibberish in that language. For example, tenses are mandatory in English.
To combine “Sarah”, “write”, and “paper” into a well-formed sentence, I must specify the time. If you don’t have a tense in an English sentence, it’s not grammatical.
But this is not the case for all languages. In the indigenous language of the Ainu people of Hokkaido, Japan, speakers are not required to specify time at all.
They can add words like “already” or “tomorrow” — but the speaker thinks the sentence is correct without them.
As the great anthropologist Franz Boas once said:
grammar […] Determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed.
Linguists are not interested in “correct” grammar. We know grammar changes over time and place – that change isn’t a bad thing for us, which is great!
By studying these rules across languages, we can gain insight into how our minds work and how we transmit meaning from ourselves to others.
We can also learn about our history, where we came from and how we got here. This is quite unusual.
Huge grammar and language database
We are excited to release Grambank to the world. Our international team of colleagues spent years building it by reading many books on language rules and talking to experts and community members about a particular language.
This is a daunting task. The syntax of different languages can be very different from each other. Also, different people have different ways of describing how these rules work.
Linguists love jargon, so understanding them can sometimes be a special challenge.
At Grambank, we use 195 questions to compare over 2,400 languages - including two sign languages. The map below outlines what we captured.
Each dot represents a language, and the more similar the colors, the more similar the language.
To create this map, we used a technique called “Principal Component Analysis” – it simplifies the 195 questions into three dimensions, which we then map onto red, green and blue.
The huge difference in color reveals how different all these languages are from each other.
Where we see similarly colored regions, like the Pacific Ocean, that could mean that the languages are related, or that they borrowed a lot from each other.
Language is very special to humans. It’s part of what makes us who we are.
Sadly, the world’s indigenous languages are facing a crisis of extinction due to colonization and globalization.
We know that every lost language severely impacts the health of Indigenous individuals and communities by severing ties to ancestry and traditional knowledge.
Nearly half of the world’s linguistic diversity is threatened
In addition to the loss of individual languages, our team also wants to understand what we lose in terms of syntactic diversity.
The Grambank database reveals a dizzying variety of languages from around the world – a testament to the human capacity for change, variation and ingenuity.
Using an ecological measure of diversity, we assess what we might lose if currently threatened languages disappear. We found that some regions will be hit harder than others.
Terrifyingly, some regions of the world, such as South America and Australia, are projected to lose all indigenous language diversity because all indigenous languages there are threatened.
Even areas where other languages are relatively safe, such as the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Europe, have seen steep declines of around 25%.
what’s next
Without continued support for language revival, many will be harmed, and our shared linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will become severely fragmented.
The United Nations has declared 2022-2032 the Decade of Indigenous Languages. Around the world, grassroots organizations including the Ngukurr Language Centre, the Noongar Boodjar Language Center and the Canadian Heiltsuk Cultural Education Center are working to preserve and revitalize languages. (dialogue)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the body of content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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