Evaluating linguistic endangerment worldwide from a biocultural aproach

Background/Question/Methods

Over the past decades declines of biological and cultural diversity have raised awareness about preserving the interrelated diversity of life, ecosystems, and cultures. In this context, 40% of all the world’s languages today are under some level of endangerment. Scientists have projected that towards the end of this century we will lose more than half of the 7,000 living languages. This signifies a great risk of lossing traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) systems worldwide, acompanied with a major loss of global cultural heritage. Language endangerment levels seem to surpass those reported for many biological species. Previous studies have uncovered a connection between geographical areas with high biological diversity and areas with high ethnolinguistic diversity. Despite considerable research effort, less attention has been provided to places where both biological and linguistic diversity are theartened, to understand what are the drivers that can cause both. For this project we aimed to develop spatial ecological models to explain why some languages and cultures are at higher risks of endangerment than others.

Results/Conclusions

We first identify global hotspots of language using a measure of latent extinction risk, defined in conservation biology as the discrepancy between a species current and predicted extinction risks. Our preliminary results show that languages and cultures are more at threat when there are fewer numbers of speakers and when they live in ecologically difficult regions (e.g., high elevation and low precipitation). Our latent extinction risk identifies the North American Pacific coast, Australia, and Amazon rim as being particularly vulnerable to future extinction risk. Abiotic variables taken into account (e.g. precipitation, temperature, elevation) were shown to be highly significant for predicting why some languages and cultures are at higher risks than others. We suggest that language loss may be partially preventable by targeting cultures with a higher latent risk that may either be understudied or in fragile ecological situations. It is critical that we asses next if both biological species and languages are declining in the sames areas and at what rate to potentially shed light into the mechanisms that make both go extinct. Leassons underpinned from our research could help guide future biocultural and TEK conservation efforts by uncovering cultures that have yet to be in danger but could potentially be in a near future.