How climate change is killing languages

A look at where the most Indigenous languages are endangered reveals the impact of previous migrations.

In 2021, 98 percent of Indigenous languages in the US and 89 percent of Indigenous languages in Australia were endangered. 

Both countries have a colonial history and have seen mass immigration from Europe in previous centuries.

These earlier migrations affect Indigenous languages to this day — we continue losing languages in these countries because speakers no longer pass them on to future generations and switch to English instead. 

So, today’s migration will likely be tomorrow’s language loss. 

Forced migration plays a large role in current migration patterns. According to the Global Trends Report 2022, more than 108 million people were forcibly displaced in 2022. About 61 million of them were displaced within their own countries.

More than half of those internally displaced had to leave their homes because of environmental disasters, such as floods and storms. The remaining people were internally displaced by conflict and violence.

Almost all internal displacement in Europe and Central Asia in 2022 was due to conflict and violence.

In contrast, almost all internal displacement in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific was caused by weather-related disasters, such as floods and storms.

Some of the most linguistically diverse countries are in South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, those regions particularly affected by environmental disasters.

Papua New Guinea has at least nine million inhabitants. Between them they speak 839 different languages with 313 of those languages endangered.

The 300,000 inhabitants of Vanuatu speak 108 different languages, of which more than half are endangered.

Indonesia has another 704 living languages, India has 424, and the Philippines has 175. Almost half of the languages spoken in these three countries are endangered.

More than one third of the languages considered endangered are spoken in those five countries alone. 

The large numbers of already endangered languages combined with the large numbers of people displaced by environmental disasters make South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific particularly vulnerable to future language loss.

Many of these endangered languages are spoken in a small geographic area and have only a few hundred speakers left.

If speakers of those languages leave their small communities and scatter — for whatever reasons — it becomes less likely that they will pass on these languages to future generations.

Outside their small communities, these languages are likely to have little economic and cultural value.

The problem with forced migration is that people lose their community.

So, lots of the things that people propose to preserve languages — like ensuring communities remain together, have a viable environment to live in and ways of making a living — do not necessarily apply here.

There are many reasons for language loss, and migration is only one part of the puzzle.

But in those parts of the world where we find many of the endangered languages, environmental disasters are a major driving force of migration.

And this forced migration — and subsequent threat to languages — has the potential to accelerate.

Anouschka Foltz is an associate professor in English linguistics in the Department of English Studies at the University of Graz in Austria. Before coming to Graz she was a lecturer in psycholinguistics at Bangor University in Wales. Her research is in the area of psycholinguistics, and her work focuses on adult language processing, L1 and L2 language acquisition as well as multilingualism. She is also interested in language rights and access to language.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.