Page:Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.pdf/13

Introduction platform. The online edition of the Atlas similarly relies on this widely available and familiar platform to present all the data included in the print edition and much more.

Some of the maps have been updated from the previous edition; others are entirely new. Likewise, many of the contributors have been involved with the project since its inception, while others (especially those working on entirely new maps) have been specially commissioned for this edition. The format of the Atlas remains much the same, however: a text covering the general issues of language endangerment in each of the regions into which the maps are divided, followed by a set of maps on which languages are plotted using a colour-coded system showing the degree of endangerment. The markers are of uniform size: it would be impossible to clearly represent tiny speech communities within a vast area inhabited by majority languages. The online version shows, at the click of a mouse on the marker, the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of a language as well as a wealth of other information, and permits interactive contributions from the world’s linguists, census-takers and, most importantly, language communities.

Since the process of language attrition and extinction is a slow one, usually occurring over several generations, the Atlas has had to be somewhat arbitrary in its choice of which languages to exclude. Our aim is to raise the alarm for languages that are, as the title states, in danger. We take this mandate to mean all languages that are known to be in decline towards a foreseeable point of extinction – where the mechanisms are not in place to ensure their transmission to future generations – a decline that is predictable, but not of course inevitable.

The terminology of the degrees of endangerment has changed slightly since the first and second editions of this Atlas. Professor Wurm had established the practice of naming the five gradations as: vulnerable languages, where decreasing numbers of children are being taught the language; endangered languages, meaning that the youngest speakers are young adults; seriously endangered languages, where the youngest speakers have already passed middle age; critically endangered languages, which have only a few elderly speakers remaining; and extinct languages, marked in the previous editions with a black cross where they were last known to be spoken. Of course, the world is littered with extinct languages, and those included here are only those that have died recently, within the past couple of generations. In practice this means: since an awareness of their plight and imminent extinction was recorded. All trace of these languages has, in some cases, been wiped out for ever.

Following a two-year period of research by an ad hoc team of linguists commissioned by UNESCO, a document was published under the title Language Vitality and Endangerment (UNESCO, 2003). It established six degrees of endangerment that ‘may be distinguished with regard to intergenerational transmission’:

''Safe (5): The language is spoken by all generations. The intergenerational transmission of the language is uninterrupted. [Thus such languages are not indicated in this Atlas.]''

''Stable yet threatened (5-): The language is spoken in most contexts by all generations with unbroken intergenerational transmission, yet multilingualism in the native language and one or more dominant language(s) has usurped certain important communication contexts. Note that such multilingualism alone is not necessarily a threat to languages.''

Vulnerable (4): Most, but not all, children or families of a particular community speak their parental language as their