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Languages, Culture and its complexities
Thaís Gonçalves Rodeiro
SITUATION OF THE LANGUAGES X NUMBER OF SPEAKERS
The world has 2.465 threatened languages or recently extinct according to UNESCO. Of those, 190 are indigenous languages found in Brazil. UNESCO categorizes the vitality of languages according to the number of speakers and the chance of inter-generational transmission. The categories vary from “vulnerable” (when most children speak the language, but only in few specific environments like, for instance, in their houses) until “in critical danger” (when only the elderly speak the language and there is a smaller change of it to spread forward to the next generation). The extinct languages are those that have not one speaker alive.
Linguistic Trunks of threatened languages
Four big linguistic trunks generate the biggest part of the threatened indigenous idioms:
MACRO-JÊ:
30 of all languages of the trunk Macro-Jê are spoken in Brazil and in its presence occurs mostly in the Amazon. This linguistic trunk includes the Karajá language, in which word are spoken differently by men and women.
ARUAQUES
N° of threatened languages: 22. The biggest linguistic trunk of America is spoken from Caribe to Argentina. There are still doubts if it has or not an ancestral conexion with tupi. Some words used in the Portuguese language like “canoa”, “Tabaco” and “batata” have origin in this trunk.
MACRO-TUPI
N° of threatened languages: 51. It is believed that the origin place of tupi languages are found in south Amazon, situated between the Tapajós river and Madeira river. Nowadays, it is the linguistic trunk with the most number of languages in Brazil.
CARIBE
N° of threatened languages: 21. Linguistic trunk found in the north of South America and with presence in the North and the center of Brazil. It includes the language Hixkaryana, one of the few that represents phrases with the object-verb-subject order.
Death of a language and a culture
Language is show we share our ideas, our information, our culture. When the last speaker of a language dies, the world looses an enormous quantity of knowledge that that language carried.
From the 2.500 threatened languages, 199 are spoken by less than 12 people. In the new Atlas of threatened languages of UNESCO, the countries with the biggest numbers of threatened languages are India (196), USA (192) and, in third place, Brazil (190). The countries with bigger language variety are the ones that suffer the most with the number of threatened languages.