Celebration of the International Mother Language Day

Mother tongues - an invisible neglected and disappearing resource

Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, University of Roskilde, Denmark

UNESCO, Mother Language Day,
21 February 2002, Paris

Languages are disappearing faster than ever before in human history. Linguists estimate that between 50 and 90 percent of today's spoken languages may be dead or moribund, i.e. not spoken by children, in a hundred years' time. Sign languages may be disappearing at a similar or even faster rate.

Every disappearing language is the mother tongue of somebody. Probably half of the world's spoken languages have not been reduced to writing. Many more are not used in writing habitually, even if they have been written down.

How many languages are there in the world? Most linguists say that there are around 6-7,000 languages. The most useful source is still The Ethnologue, edited by Barbara Grimes from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a missionary organisation - see. The Ethnologue lists over 6.800 languages in 228 countries. But there might be even twice as many: 12-14.000 languages. There are deaf people in all societies, and where hearing people have developed spoken, oral languages, the Deaf have developed Sign languages, fully-fledged, complex, abstract languages. Those who speak about 'languages' but in fact mean spoken languages only, participate through invisibilising sign languages in killing maybe half the linguistic diversity on earth. Here I discuss only oral languages - we still know too little about Sign languages even if the literature is growing fast. But all the numbers are educated guesses. I shall present some of them.

The top ten languages in the world (Table 1) are spoken by almost half of the world's population as their mother tongues. Read