15 2. Overall framework of contact phenomena 2.1. ON THE GENERAL CAUSES OF LANGUAGE CHANGE It has been established that there are well over 6,000 languages spoken throughout the world today. Currently, the number of languages varies between 3,000 and 10,000 (Comrie [2001] 2003: 19), however a debate on the exact number is still in progress. Tasaku Tsunoda notices that “[t]he vast majority of languages are minority peoples’ languages, rather than so called major languages, such as English” (2005: 1). A frightening fact is that the number of languages is rapidly diminishing. Most languages are still under threat of extinction within the next two generations of their native speakers. The reasons for their disappearance are mostly economic, but the major cause is the fact that languages are not being passed down from one generation to another. Christopher Moseley (2007: vii–xvi) believes that the economic factors which lead to language death are important but not uniform. It is certain that gradual urbanization, especially if rapid economic changes take place over one or two generations, causes continuous language decline, as members of poor communities emigrate to cities in search of work, abandoning their villages and their past lifestyles. Concern over rapidly disappearing languages of the world has appeared in the last decade, and awareness of rapid language decline has led to the creation of various initiatives in order to increase the global knowledge of endangered languages, e.g. the publication of the UNESCO Red Book,6 which first appeared in 1995, listing the endangered languages. In 1995 the University of Tokyo set up a Clearing House for endangered languages. The scientists put emphasis on recording newly discovered instances of languages rather than on preserving them. Documenting them is in some cases an extremely difficult process. Professor Jim Fox from Stanford University has regularly traveled for the last fifteen years to make records of one of the disappearing Mayan languages (Aymara, in the south of the Yucatan Peninsula), of which there are only two speakers left. The research requires an exhausting daily “interrogation” in harsh conditions, and he is only trying to document one of the six thousand endangered languages. It is interesting that, statistically, 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by 4% of its population (Crystal 2000: 14). Moseley, in his encyclopedia published in 2007, lists more than 6000 endangered languages. The size of the book clearly reflects how large the scale of possible language deaths is. 6 Moseley, Christopher (ed.) (2010) Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Paris: UNESCO Publishing. http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas
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