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St. Louis Post-Dispath, February 16, 2004 Eli Kintisch, Seattle A previously unrecorded language in central Siberia highlights the gradual decline of the world's endangered languages, a linguist told a scientific meeting here Sunday. Scientists have indexed more than 6,800 languages around the world, with Mandarin Chinese, English and Spanish ranking as the languages spoken worldwide by the most people. Most languages, however, are spoken by relatively few people. Last summer, K. David Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, documented the language of Chulym, a relative of Turkish and Azerbaijani. "Human languages are vanishing as we speak, quite literally," said Harrison. The decline of the world's languages, he said, "makes the extinction of species look trivial by comparison." According to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, handfuls of American citizens speak 74 endangered languages, including Algonquin and Iroquois tongues. A Siberian community of 600 called the Tofa have only about 40 fluent speakers of their language left, said Harrison, who has recorded that language as well. Among the Chulym words that Harrison and his partner documented in writing and on digital video: alychtipiskem, which means "I went out moose hunting." Some researchers fear that as languages vanish, local cultural know-how could disappear along with them. That could mean that centuries of local knowledge on plants or botanical cures, for example, could be lost before scientists could learn to use ancient medicines. "If you want, you might talk to a pharmaceutical company about the kind of ethnobotanical knowledge encoded in the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon," said Stephen Anderson, a Yale linguist. Along with humanitarian reasons, scientists study fading languages for the same reason they devote their lives to ancient music or distant supernovae - that is, pure scientific curiosity. Families in the tiny group of ethnic Chulym - Harrison counted 426 - raise their children to speak Russian. The Chulyms' ancestors came from Mongolia to Siberia around 500. They live in six isolated villages along with ethnic Russians 500 miles from the Arctic circle. In the course of his field research on the language, Harrison found only 35 people in the community who knew the language fluently. The youngest fluent speaker of the Chulym, a truck driver named Vasya, was 52 years old when Harrison met him. Languages disappear when governments erase them, when people move or as economics changes the way groups live. Chulym was among dozens of lan guages that Soviet educators banned when they imposed Russian on local groups in Siberia more than 50 years ago, but Harrison said the language had already begun to disappear by then. Recording endangered languages is complicated by the fact that lingui sts have not developed a common definition of what makes up a language. That makes it hard to come up with a total of the world's languages. Linguists usually start with the Summer Institute of Linguistics' count of 6,809 languages. Given the somewhat arbitrary way of defining languages, said Anderson, the number is meaningless. Georgetown University linguist Raffaella Zanuttini reasons that the number is far more that 6,809. Said linguist David Lightfoot, also of Georgetown, "There is one language - human." In terms of communication systems, a speaker of Chinese and another speaker of Russian are much more similar than a chimp and a bird. Future studies on language and the human brain, he added, could give more clues. But, he said, "To say, 'That's the brain of a cello player Japanese mother of two' - we're nowhere near that." "Whatever the number is, it will be a lot less before long," said Anderson.
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