What are the causes of language extinction?

An endangered language is one that is likely to become extinct in the near future. Many
languages are failing out of use and being replaced by others that are more widely used in the
region or nation, such as English in the U.S. or Spanish in Mexico. Unless current trends are
reversed, these endangered languages will become extinct within the next century. Many other
languages are no longer being learned by new generations of children or by new adult speakers;
these languages will become extinct when their last speaker dies. In fact, dozens of languages
today have only one native speaker still living, and that person's death will mean the extinction
of the language: It will no longer be spoken, or known, by anyone.

The process of extinction of a language could be fast or gradual. In one generation, the
fate of a language could be determined, particularly if the younger children are not learning the
language. In the Alaskan communities of Yupik Eskimos, children still spoke Yupik about 20
years ago. Today, the youngest Yupik speakers are in their 20s while English is the only
language the children speak. Up until the 1940s, people in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island
spoke Scots Gaelic. Around the 1970s, children are no longer learning the language. In other
areas, the decline of many languages was more gradual. The use of Mohawk and Onondaga,
which are Iroquoian languages slowly declined. These Native American languages were used in
upstate New York and in some parts of Canada. Although the number of speakers is declining,
older adults in these regions are still speaking the language. Mohawk for example is still used by
younger generations.

Outright genocide is one cause of language extinction. For example, when European
invaders exterminated the Tasmanians in the early 19th century, an unknown number of
languages died as well. Far more often, however, languages become extinct when a community
finds itself under pressure to integrate with a larger or more powerful group. Sometimes the
people learn the outsiders' language in addition to their own; this has happened in Greenland, a
territory of Denmark, where Kalaallisut is learned alongside Danish. But often the community is
pressured to give up its language and even its ethnic and cultural identity. This has been the case
for the ethnic Kurds in Turkey, who are forbidden by law to print or formally teach their
language. It has also been the case for younger speakers of Native American languages, who, as
recently as the ig6os, were punished for speaking their native languages at boarding schools.

Another is the diminishing number of native speakers. Age, use of the language by
children, presence of other languages, attitude towards the language and their users’ sense of
ethnic identity, government policies, job opportunities and urban drift are additional factors that
affect the survival and preservation of a language. An endangered language is considered as such
due to the lack of vital factors that could help it to survive. It could be the lack of alphabet as
many of the older languages are oral languages. It could be because it does not have literary
works or there’s a lack of people who can write and read the language.

Migration is another factor. If the native speakers move into another location where the
government promotes the use of a particular language, the mother tongue will be abandoned. In
some cases, the parents believe that more opportunities would be available to their children if
they become fluent in the adopted language. Some parents stop using their native language for
this particular reason.

When a community loses its language, it often loses a great deal of its cultural identity at
the same time. Although language loss may be voluntary or involuntary, it always involves
pressure of some kind, and it is often felt as a loss of social identity or as a symbol of defeat.
That doesn't mean that a group's social identity is always lost when its language is lost; for
example, both the Chumash in California and the Manx on the Isle of Man have lost their native
languages, but not their identity as Chumash or Manx. But language is a powerful symbol of a
group's identity. Much of the cultural, spiritual, and intellectual life of a people is experienced
through language. This ranges from prayers, myths, ceremonies, poetry, oratory, and technical
vocabulary to everyday greetings, leave- takings, conversational styles, humor, ways of speaking
to children, and terms for habits, behaviors, and emotions. When a language is lost, all of this
must be refashioned in the new language-with different words, sounds, and grammar- if it is to
be kept at all. Frequently traditions are abruptly lost in the process and replaced by the cultural
habits of the more powerful group. For these reasons, among others, it is often very important to
the community itself that its language survive.

Much is lost from a scientific point of view as well when a language disappears. A
people's history is passed down through its language, so when the language disappears, it may
take with it important information about the early history of the community. The loss of human
languages also severely limits what linguists can learn about human cognition. By studying what
all of the world's languages have in common, we can find out what is and isn't possible in a
human language. This in turn tells us important things about the human mind and how it is that
children are able to learn a complex system like language so quickly and easily. The fewer
languages there are to study, the less we will be able to learn about the human mind.

Many of the endangered languages around the world are spoken within small
communities, where many of the world’s languages could be found. Many are ethnic languages
that are spoken by tribes and marginalized communities, such as those found in Papua New
Guinea, which has the most number of living languages in the world. Include here the languages
of the Native Americans, the Aborigines of Australia and the tribal and national languages of
Africa, Oceania and Asia. Add to this list the languages spoken by smaller communities such as
the Basques, Provençal, Frisians and the Irish. In North America, the rate of decline in the
number of languages spoken is significant. Many of the languages are currently spoken by adults
ages 50 and over. Very few children speak their parents’ mother tongue, as the older generations
failed to transmit their languages to their children, leading to many languages becoming
endangered. Other languages are threatened because the speakers reside in communities where
the main language spoken is English, a language that their children adopt. Pressure from the
community, media, videos and films entice the younger generations to join a commercialized and
glamorous environment that does not have any clear connection with the native community they
live in, their traditions and their elders.
 Languages in Contact

One of the tribulations of ranging outward from your home is that sooner or later you will
encounter people who do not speak your language, nor you theirs. In some parts of the world, for
example in bilingual communities, you may not have to travel very far at all to find the language
disconnect, and in other parts you may have to cross an ocean. Because this situation is so
common in human history and society, several solutions for bridging this communication gap
have arisen.

Lingua Francas

Many areas of the world are populated by people who speak diverse languages. In such
areas, where groups desire social or commercial communication, one language is often used by
common agreement. Such a language is called a lingua franca. In medieval times, a trade
language based largely on the languages that became modern Italian and Provençal came into
use in the Mediterranean ports.

That language was called Lingua Franca, “Frankish language.” The term lingua franca
was generalized to other languages similarly used. Thus, any language can be a lingua franca.
English has been called “the lingua franca of the whole world” and is standardly used at
international business meetings and academic conferences.

Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles

Another way of communicating with people who speak at different languages, you may
not know, is called a pidgin. Speakers of mutually unintelligible languages have been brought
into contact under specific socioeconomic and political conditions and have developed a
language to communicate with one another that is not native to anyone. Such a language is called
a pidgin. The two or more groups use their native languages as a basis for developing a
rudimentary lingua franca with reduced grammatical structures and small lexicons. Also in these
situations, it is generally the case that one linguistic group is in a more powerful position,
economically or otherwise, such as the relationship of plantation owner to worker or slave
owners to slaves. Most of the lexical items of the pidgin come from the language of the dominant
group. This language is called superstrate or lexifier language. For example, English (the
language of the plantation owners) is the superstrate language for Hawaiian Pidgin English.
Although pidgins are in some sense rudimentary, they are not devoid of rules. The phonology is
rule-governed, as in any human language. The inventory of phonemes is generally
small.Typically, pidgins lack grammatical words such as auxiliary verbs, prepositions, and
articles, and inflectional morphology including tense and case endings.

Creoles
 A creole is defined as a language that has evolved in a contact situation to become the
native language of a generation of speakers. The traditional view is that creoles develop a far
richer and more complex language that shares the fundamental characteristics of a “regular”
human language and allows speakers to use the language in all domains of daily life.

Bilingualism

The term bilingualism refers to the ability to speak two (or more) languages. There are
various degrees of individual bilingualism. Some people have native-like control of two
languages, whereas others make regular use of two languages with a high degree of proficiency
but lack the linguistic competence of a native or near native speaker in one or the other language.
Also, some bilinguals may have oral competence but not read or write one or more of their
languages. Codeswitching is a speech style unique to bilinguals, in which fluent speakers switch
languages between or within sentences