LIGN 8 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Ethnologue, Language Shift, Numic Languages
Document Summary
Lecture 9 native american and indigenous languages & Multiplicities of languages and language endangerment: some language statistics, around 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, according to the. A bunch of american indian languages of different language families: 8: (moribund, nearly extinct, 9: (dormant and reawakening!) No known l1 speakers; more l2 speakers: 10: extinct. Innate lake of intelligence among indigenous peoples ( innateness hypothesis ) Why number of speakers is not a key factor: small speech communities can be stable. For example: california languages before european contact. Interrupted intergenerational transmission of the language: when no children are learning the language anymore, results into a moribund" or dying" language. Extinct", dead" or sleeping" language = no speakers left. In many hispanophone countries, the term dialecto is misappropriated when talking about indigenous languages: yes, languages have variants can be dialects, but the motivation is different.
