6,000 languages: an embattled heritage
[1] Are the vast majority of languages doomed to die out in the near future? Specialists reckon that no language can survive
unless 100,000 people speak it. Half of the 6,000 or so languages in the world today are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people and
a quarter by less than 1,000. Only a score are spoken by hundreds of millions of people.
[4] The death of language is not a new phenomenon. Since languages diversified, at least 30,000 (some say as many as half
a million) of them have been born and disappeared, often without leaving any trace. Languages usually have a relatively short life
span as well as a very high death rate. Only a few, including Basque, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit
[7] and Tamil, have lasted more than 2,000 years.
What is new, however, is the speed at which they are dying out. Europe’s colonial conquests caused a sharp decline in
linguistic diversity, eliminating at least 15 per cent of all languages spoken at the time. Over the last 300 years, Europe has lost
[10] a dozen, and Australia has only 20 left of the 250 spoken at the end of the 18th century. In Brazil, about 540 (three-quarters of
the total) have died out since Portuguese colonization began in 1530.
By making great efforts to establish an official language in education, the media and the civil service, national
[13] governments have deliberately tried to eliminate minority languages. This process of linguistic standardization has been boosted
by industrialization and scientific progress, which have imposed new methods of communication that are swift, straightforward
and practical. Language diversity came to be seen as an obstacle to trade and the spread of knowledge.
[16] More recently, the internationalization of financial markets, the dissemination of information by electronic media and
other aspects of globalization have intensified the threat to “small” languages. A language that is not on the Internet is a language
that “no longer exists” in the modern world.
[19] The rate of language extinction has now reached the unprecedented worldwide level of 10 every year. Some people
predict that 50 to 90 per cent of today’s spoken languages will disappear during this century. Their preservation is an urgent
matter.
[22] The 1992 Rio Earth Summit set up machinery to combat shrinking biodiversity. Now, it is time for a Rio summit to tackle
languages. A number of instruments have been adopted, and projects have been launched to safeguard what is now considered
a heritage of humanity. These laws and initiatives may not prevent languages from dying out, but at least they will slow down this
[25] process and encourage multilingualism.
Internet: (adapted).
According to the text above, judge the next item.
The verb “to prevent” in the fragment “may not prevent languages from dying out” (l.24) is closest in meaning to incite.
