# Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (Third Edition)/Cartographic representation of the world's endangered languages

​Cartographic representation of the world’s endangered languages
Christopher Moseley
The first edition of this Atlas was coordinated from the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra, by the late Professor S. A. Wurm. The school was in a unique position to record the location of languages graphically, as it had its own well-equipped cartographic department. Since then, however, there have been significant developments in the field of cartography as well as in the amount of linguistic data available. This third edition has adopted some essentially different methods of presenting a snapshot of the current state of language endangerment worldwide.
The editorial team has given a great deal of thought as to whether the location of languages should be shown by means of polygons (or areas delimited by borders), accurately corresponding in scale to the territory occupied by the language, or, as in the previous editions, by single (or in some cases multiple) points. For both the online and the printed versions of this edition, we decided in the end to retain single points of a standard size. There are several reasons for this: first, many languages in danger of disappearing are characteristically spoken over a very restricted territory, often a steadily diminishing one. Second, the shape of a polygon would imply that surrounding language(s) also occupy a distinctly shaped territory, which, however, has been omitted from these maps. Third, this in turn implies a discrete monolingualism, which is unlikely to be the case. Speakers of endangered languages are usually forced by circumstances to become fluent in one or more majority languages, for communication with larger out-groups. Fourth, and consequently, this would require an overlap between the polygons to indicate multilingualism, which would detract from the impact of the single points, in many cases clustered together in complex areas of multiple endangerment.
​In its first edition, the Atlas was closely bound up with the Red Book of Languages in Danger of Disappearing (UNESCO, 1993}, and took its name from that book. Among the stated aims of the project were: (a) the continuation of the gathering of information as to which languages are to be considered endangered, their status and the degree of urgency of their study, for transmission to the Clearing House for Scientific Information in Tokyo; (6) the collection of materials in endangered languages that had hitherto been little studied, especially those of interest for typology; and (c} the preservation and protection of languages. These and other aims were to be served by the publication of this Atlas. There was no stated intention to cover the entire globe, but rather to highlight areas of particularly acute language endangerment. The widespread nature of the problem was illustrated by taking sample areas from every continent. However, as we came to prepare this third edition, the need for a far more comprehensive coverage was obvious. Languages are under threat on every continent, and UNESCO sees the need to treat the problem as a universal one.
Linguistic geography, if we may call it that, is a young discipline and not yet a recognized branch of science. Language mapping for most of the past century has concerned itself with single countries, with particular linguistic phenomena such as dialect distribution and isoglosses. Language maps embracing whole continents and regions emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century, but it was not until the Atlas of the World's Languages (Moseley and Asher, 1994) was published that a truly global coverage became possible. The cataloguing of the world’s languages was pioneered by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now, SIL International) in their regularly revised volume, the Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Lewis, 2009}; in its printed and online versions this does indeed include maps, but the maps are subsidiary to the textual identification and description of language.
Independently of this, the science of cartography was making great advances. The distribution of human languages is of course intimately bound up with topography, climate, soil conditions and a host of other factors that allow human settlement, and it has now become possible to set the distribution of languages against a topographic background that displays the conditions for human settlement, and population density. Humankind is infinitely adaptable, but obviously the most densely populated areas are those with a ready fertile access to food, and the most sparsely populated, as a rule, those with the harshest climate and most arid soil.
As with the two previous editions of this volume, a team of expert linguists from around the world was assembled to enter the latest available data on the languages of the regions into which the maps are divided. They used a new method, however. Overseen by UNESCO's Web Editor for the project, they were able to enter the data in both the online and printed editions of this Atlas directly onto maps provided by the Google Earth system. These maps have the advantage over the previous editions of giving a clear and accurate picture of the topography of the region depicted, Further, in the online edition it is possible to ‘zoom in’ on any particular area of linguistic interest with a great deal of variability.
Given the much greater degree of accuracy in geographical representation, the team of linguists faced several new challenges. A high level of accuracy was asked of them when pinpointing the location of a language with a standard-sized point, and of course the distribution of a language is in many cases not adequately shown by a single point. Therefore we often deemed it necessary to use multiple points to indicate the spread of a language. An endangered language might indeed be confined to just one village in some places, but in ​others, among nomadic peoples, say, in sparsely populated regions, their territory may cover a vast area. So we readily admit that a single point is only a rough approximation. On the other hand, experience has taught us that varying the size of the points according to population or territorial size would ‘crowd out’ other minority languages in multilingual areas to the detriment of the smaller ones, making the maps less legible. Amere glance at the overall world map, with its myriad of pinpoints, will prove this.
What is more informative, we decided, is to retain the system of single points, colour-coded for their degree of endangerment. If the data on the maps are sometimes difficult to interpret, the accompanying text should provide clarification. Sparsely populated regions, such as Alaska, contain numerous languages which have few speakers, and those speakers may be widely spread; in such cases, the points have been deployed to give an indication of the extent of the language. To pretend to greater accuracy than this, where so few speakers are involved, would soon make our mapping out of date.
Endangered languages are no respecters of national boundaries, and there are nurnerous instances in this Atlas of languages that straddle borders. On either side of a national border, the same language may be faring differently, due to economic circumstances, or national language policies, or other factors, A good example of this in Europe is the Basque language, which crosses the border of France and Spain, but is in a different state of health on either side, and is marked as such. There are of course languages that are healthy and robust in some places {and thus not shown there} but languishing elsewhere. Our editors for highland and lowland South America have, for instance, been diligent in trying to map the true situation of the Quechua/Quichua continuum, which traverses several national boundaries. (This fact is yet another argument against the use of polygons on our maps.) And where different varieties of the same language are pinpointed separately, we have tried as far as possible to distinguish them with appropriate and recognizable designations.
For each threatened language we have attempted to provide some basic data for the user (more detailed, of course, in the online edition}: geographical coordinates of latitude and longitude; the name in most common use; alternate names (where necessary, in alternate scripts); the number of speakers and the date of the census when this was last ascertained; a textual description of the location; and the ISO-639 code. This internationally recognized method of identifying languages by a unique three-letter standard code, created by the International Standards Organization (ISO)}, was applied by the publishers of the Ethnologue, SIL. The coding is necessary because several widely disparate languages may bear the same name or confusingly similar names. What, for instance, is meant by the language name ‘Tonga’? Is it a Bantu language of Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, a minority language in Thailand or the national language of the island state of Tonga? It is all of these, and separate codes allocated to these languages obviate the confusion. Sources of information are also given as fully as possible. This Atlas aims to provide an accurate record of the state of humanity’s fragile resource, language, in its most precarious situations, as of the year 2009. It is a constantly changing situation and our methods are geared towards keeping it under constant review in the coming years.
Our contributors have not used the ISO-639 codes unquestioningly, however. In many cases we found that the same code is given to two languages that we know to be distinct; on the other hand, two codes may have been assigned in the past to what prove, with better knowledge, to be one and the same language. We have made use of the coding to ​the best of our ability, but we hope that our findings will help to correct some misdesignations.
Where the distribution of threatened minority languages is relatively dense (in West Africa or the Himalayas, for example}, the topography (mountains and valleys, difficult terrain) also lends itself to the presence of discrete speech communities and therefore their representation by single points may be unambiguous and uncontroversial. But this may also mean that the language, though spoken by few people, is stable and secure, and does not earn a place in the Atlas. Where the speech community is spread over a wide area, unimpeded by topographical obstacles, however, such as in Siberia, much of North America and the southern part of South America, the representation by this system is problematic, and we must frankly admit that our mapping method is a compromise. By their nature, endangered languages tend to have small populations, and these populations are likely to be multilingual — speaking the majority regional or national language, and very often other adjacent minority languages as well. Multilingualism is a factor we cannot show on a map with our method, though it is discussed at various points in the accompanying text. We are all well aware of the problem and the need for compromise. To highlight the issue, | shall quote a question put by one of our regional editors to the designer of the input system:
A single point for a language spoken in a single village would be fine, but a single point or a few points for a language spoken across many thousands of square kilometres would make that language appear to be very poorly represented: for example, Yupik Eskimo, Inuit, Cree, varieties of Quechua, Arabic, etc. In Argentina, for example, how will you be able to distinguish where Mapudungu (Mapuche) ends from areas with no speakers of anything (or of only Spanish)? In northern Argentina, how can we show where Wichi ends (that is, the extent of its territory) and where Spanish is the only language? In North America, how do we show that Navajo covers a large geographical area, but Hopi only a small one?
These very valid concerns required a considered response. Apart from the problem of representing multilingualism within an area presented as ostensibly monolingual, there is the additional issue of the notion of ancestral territory. In certain parts of the world, notably North America but also Australia and elsewhere, populations have been moved from their traditional lands to reservations, usually with clearly defined boundaries. To merely indicate these boundaries, or alternatively to show the ancestral lands, would ultimately be a disservice to the speakers, as it would not show their true current situation. It might give the reader a false picture of the health and vigour of fast-dwindling languages.
For these and other practical reasons, we decided to retain the ‘point’ system used in the previous editions, but to greatly increase the number of languages covered and to carefully monitor and, where necessary, revise the indication of the level of endangerment. We acknowledge the shortcomings of this selective mapping, but our overriding aim has been to highlight the presence of the world’s most threatened languages, irrespective of the area they cover. As an extreme example of scattered versus concentrated speech communities, we might cite Tundra Nenets and Tundra Enets in Siberia: the former is found sparsely settled over several thousand square kilometres; the latter is now confined to one village.
​What the reader will not find on these maps are pidgin and trade languages. These ‘languages of wider intercultural communication’, as they are sometimes called, come into being and fade away over time as the need for them as a bridge between mutually unintelligible languages rises and falls. They are by nature second languages for their speakers, and so the question of ‘number of first-language speakers’ does not arise. Apart from the extreme difficulty of mapping such naturally mobile languages by means of fixed points, the data on their use are extremely fluid, and we have thus consciously omitted them. Furthermore, the Atlas aims at emphasizing diversity rather than homogeneity, in parallel with the avowed UNESCO aim of recording the world’s biodiversity, and drawing a direct parallel between the conservation of diversity in nature and that in human culture. Pidgins and trade languages are an interesting and important phenomenon, however, and are discussed where appropriate in the text.
Creoles (mixed languages that have become first languages) are a different matter, and where they are endangered, we have tried to record them. In many parts of the world, however, the development of a creole implies the extinction and replacement of one or more indigenous languages by one with a wider speaker base (but not always: they may also arise from the mixing of different immigrant populations).
Nor have we dealt with the issue of sign languages, with one notable exception in sub-Saharan Africa. Sign languages for the deaf are indeed highly diverse, and cogent arguments can be made for their endangerment, but they are typically used over wider areas than most endangered spoken languages, and their attrition can be attributed to non-linguistic factors including technical innovations such as cochlear implants.
It might be argued that we have neglected to indicate in these maps a very important factor in language maintenance, namely literacy, as mentioned in the Introduction to this edition. The presence of a written form of an indigenous language will usually contribute to its preservation, enhance its prestige relative to other languages, make the language transmissible to unseen generations and locations, and thus ensure its future. Unfortunately the issue is not clear-cut, and although we might have devised a method for indicating literacy among the speaker populations in our symbol-and-colour coding system, too often, in the available data, mother-tongue literacy and second- or majority- language literacy are confused. Some endangered languages, such as Sorbian in Germany, do have a literary standard {in this case, two distinct standards) and a high degree of mother-tongue literacy, but this has not prevented its endangerment. Perhaps it has delayed its extinction.
This issue is discussed at greater length in the individual regional chapters, but in ethnically diverse countries with low incomes and low educational opportunities among the endangered speaker communities, education through a wider medium than the mother tongue is the norm rather than the exception. This situation is not likely to change within a generation despite the advocacy of UNESCO and many educators and governments. It is hoped, however, that the Atlas will contribute to an awareness of the problem of mother-tongue illiteracy so that it can be better monitored in future editions.
The distinction between language and dialect is an intractable question and we will not pretend that there are any easy answers. Our regional editors have been faced with numerous questions and decisions around this issue. Within a generally robust and widespread language with a written standard, such as Arabic, for example, should the Atlas include varieties that are universally regarded as dialects but ​are undergoing attrition? Is a ‘language’ that crosses national boundaries a ‘dialect’ on the other side of the border from where you are standing? Objective criteria can be applied, of course — common vocabulary, mutual intelligibility, grammatical and morphological analyses, measured in percentages — but in too many instances, not enough is known or agreed, so inevitably our concept of ‘language’ and ‘dialect’ remains elastic, and our regional editors have used their discretion. Speakers of dialects will tend to write in the literary standard, as they were taught at school, however much their own speech may depart from its norms, and to take this standard as a benchmark for the ‘correct’ language.
Yet another cartographic problem arises with non-territorial ‘diaspora’ languages. These are languages of international distribution that have proved impossible to map accurately or comprehensively, such as Romani and Yiddish. Although it would be possible to map some of the locations of these languages, they would not tell the full story and would be mere tokens. There are also some, such as Plautdietsch and Ladino, which have migrated far from their original homelands but still occupy discrete and identifiable settlements that can be mapped. (These languages are discussed in the relevant chapters below.)
The regional editors of this volume have tried wherever possible to use the latest and most authoritative available data on census figures, language classification and locations. While Member States of UNESCO are all referred to on the maps by their official names, the data presented have not relied on the sanction of those governments, but are the responsibility of the editors and their contributors. Sources are cited as comprehensively as possible for all the data.
This third edition of the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is a new and pioneering work in many respects, but most particularly in terms of cartography. Preparation of the maps for the online version was a rapid learning curve for the contributing regional editors and their assistants, and I should like to record my sincere thanks to them all for their patience and forbearance and willingness to cooperate in meeting a tight publication schedule.
This is an ongoing project, and there can be no definitive final edition as long as human beings are speaking animals. Readers are invited to point out any errors of fact or omissions so that they can be rectified in future editions.