Abstract
In an extension of demographic logic, demographic methods and perspectives can be applied to languages as “population” units. In this chapter I make an exploratory examination of this theme. I consider such matters as the relation of demographic elements and events to linguistic elements and events, the count of living languages, the net growth in the number of languages, the birth and death of languages, and the construction of a life table for languages and for the persons who speak a given language. Continuing this general theme, in the following two chapters I discuss the migration of languages (i.e., the spread of languages beyond their principal areas of use), mainly as a result of the geographic movement of peoples who speak the language, and the preparation of estimates and projections of languages and of their speakers. Inasmuch as the data needed to implement some of the analyses suggested are scarce or lacking, it is not possible to carry them out at this time and I limit myself merely to discussing the relevant data and issues.
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Notes
- 1.
New languages are born from time to time, sometimes even in brief periods, adding to the diversity of the linguistic stock, but new biological species arise only over many millennia and are now disappearing at an alarming rate. Linguists do not work to initiate and facilitate the birth of new languages and protect their development, as they do to protect endangered languages from dying out. Linguists consider the birth of a new language as a natural process, but seem not to view the death of a language as equally natural.
Demographers work to influence the number of human births as well as the number of human deaths through their writings on pronatalist and antinatalist public policies, trends in and the factors affecting fertility , and the trends, causes, and consequences of mortality and ill-health.
- 2.
With the limited human and financial resources available, it would seem impossible to save all the languages that are endangered, even if this was desirable. It seems useful, therefore, to devise a plan for selecting the endangered languages that should be saved first. A model for the linguistic anthropologists is provided by the conservation biologists, who have developed an algorithm that indicates which species merit prior attention (Owen, 2014; Isaac et al., 2007). One such algorithm, considered at the species level in its taxonomic group is a function of two elements: Evolutionary distinctiveness or phylogenetic isolation (ED) and extinction risk (GE). ED use a super-tree (a synthesis of multiple overlapping phylogenies) for a particular taxonomic group to determine how many years of evolutionary history a species in the taxonomic group represents. GE represents species endangerment by an index similar to the UNESCO scores noted earlier (0 = least concern to 4 = critically endangered). Each species receives a score calculated from the equation:
$$ \mathrm{EDGE}=\ln\ \left(1+\mathrm{ED}\right)+\mathrm{GE}\ \mathrm{x}\ \left(\ln\ 2\right) $$Translated into words, EDGE scores represent the sum of a log transformation of the species-specific expected loss of evolutionary history and a log transformation of the scale value for the extinction risk (Owen, 2014).
From the rank order of the species EDGE values, in a given taxonomic group, the median value can be determined and special attention can be given to those species above the median, excluding those species that had ED values below the median for the ED series and those species that had GE values that did not represent vulnerability. By analogy, years of evolutionary history of a language and a measure of the endangerment of the language may be considered the elements in an algorithm guiding linguists as to the order in which endangered languages should be saved from extinction.
- 3.
There is an alternative non-life table measure of language attrition: The median of the generations which speaks the language at home or knows the native language very well, that is, the point above which and below which 50% of the population of the “immigrant” generations can speak the native language very well. For this measure, simply interpolate between the half generations to determine the point at which the population first falls below 50% of the total. This measure does not tell you the life expectancy of the language, but a comparison of the level of the medians for various populations indicates the progression of the duration of survival of the languages for the populations being compared.
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Siegel, J.S. (2018). Demographic Processes Applied to Languages and Language-Defined Populations. In: Demographic and Socioeconomic Basis of Ethnolinguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61778-7_11
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