The American Indian Education KnowledgeBase : Element 4 : Activity 4 : Task 2: Discover How American Indian and Indigenous Languages Around the World Are Endangered
Guideline: About every two weeks, another of the world's languages dies, and is no longer spoken by anyone. The United States is one of the areas where this is happening, especially in Oklahoma and California, where the last speakers of many American Indian languages are very old. These languages represent vital links to the culture and identity of native peoples, and there is increasing interest in ensuring that native children continue to speak their heritage language.
This 2001 article from the Cultural Survival Quarterly notes "that of the more than two million people who identify themselves as American Indians in the United States, only 361, 978 still speak one of the remaining 154 indigenous languages, and many of those are only spoken by the very old."
"Nearly 80 percent of the world's population speaks only one percent of its languages. When the last speaker of a language dies, the world loses the knowledge that was contained in that language. The goal of the Enduring Voices Project is to document endangered languages and prevent language extinction by identifying the most crucial areas where languages are endangered and embarking on expeditions to understand the geographic dimensions of language distribution, determine how linguistic diversity is linked to biodiversity, and bring wide attention to the issue of language loss."
This article from the Cultural Survival Quarterly provides "an overview of the disappearance of America's first languages: how it happened and what can be about it."
Print this page
The contents of this website were developed under a cooperative agreement from the