LING 1020 Lecture 27: LING1020 LECTURE 27
Document Summary
Only a dozen of the original u. s. languages have a chance of surviving in the next 30 years. 91 languages are on its last breath . 46 languages are struggling to survive the decade. Language death when the last speaker of a language dies. Critically endangered youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently. Severely endangered language spoken by grandparents and older generations; parent generation may understand it, but do not speak it to children or among themselves. Definitely endangered children don"t learn the language as mother tongue in the home. Vulnerable language spoken by most children, but restricted to certain domains (e. g. home) Safe language spoken by all generations; intergenerational transmission uninterrupted. Speakers die: natural death, genocides, ethnic cleansing, wars, disease. Language contact two or more languages or linguistic varieties interact. Language shift process by which a language community adopts another language.
