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130-397: Language shift most commonly occurs when speakers switch to a language associated with social or economic power or one spoken more widely, leading to the gradual decline and eventual death of the endangered language. The process of language shift is often influenced by factors such as globalisation, economic authorities, and the perceived prestige of certain languages. The ultimate result is

260-586: A diglossic spectrum with little conflict. For instance, the local Venetian dialects in Northeast Italy are widely used and locally promoted in the region; after all, Italian had been an integral part of the Republic of Venice since the 14th century, whose elites used to revere the most prominent Tuscan authors and tuscanize their own speech as well. On a survey made by Il Gazzettino in 2015, 70% of respondents told they spoke Venetian "very or quite often" in

390-710: A non-governmental organization in the service of international educational development since December 1925 and joined UNESCO in 1969, after having established a joint commission in 1952. After the signing of the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration of the United Nations , the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME) began meetings in London which continued from 16 November 1942 to 5 December 1945. On 30 October 1943,

520-546: A specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It has 194 member states and 12 associate members, as well as partners in the non-governmental , intergovernmental and private sector . Headquartered in Paris , France, UNESCO has 53 regional field offices and 199 national commissions. UNESCO

650-467: A Commission to study the feasibility of having nations freely share cultural, educational and scientific achievements. This new body, the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), was created in 1922 and counted such figures as Henri Bergson , Albert Einstein , Marie Curie , Robert A. Millikan , and Gonzague de Reynold among its members (being thus a small commission of

780-706: A French-only approach (mid-19th century), marginalizing Basque, and by the 1960s family transmission was grinding to a halt in many areas at the feet of the Pyrenees. By the 2010s, the receding trend has been somewhat mitigated by the establishment of Basque schooling (the ikastolak ) spearheaded by the network Seaska , as well as the influence of the Basque territories from Spain . According to Fañch Broudic , Breton has lost 80% of its speakers in 60 years. Other sources mention that 70% of Breton speakers are over 60. Furthermore, 60% of children received Breton from their parents in

910-482: A Preparatory Commission was established. The Preparatory Commission operated between 16 November 1945, and 4 November 1946 — the date when UNESCO's Constitution came into force with the deposit of the twentieth ratification by a member state. The first General Conference took place from 19 November to 10 December 1946, and elected Julian Huxley to Director-General. United States Army colonel, university president and civil rights advocate Blake R. Van Leer joined as

1040-656: A United Nations Conference for the establishment of an educational and cultural organization (ECO/CONF) was convened in London from 1 to 16 November 1945 with 44 governments represented. The idea of UNESCO was largely developed by Rab Butler , the Minister of Education for the United Kingdom, who had a great deal of influence in its development. At the ECO/CONF, the Constitution of UNESCO was introduced and signed by 37 countries, and

1170-638: A biennium, as well as links to relevant programmatic and financial documents. These two distinct sets of information are published on the IATI registry, respectively based on the IATI Activity Standard and the IATI Organization Standard. There have been proposals to establish two new UNESCO lists. The first proposed list will focus on movable cultural heritage such as artifacts, paintings, and biofacts. The list may include cultural objects, such as

1300-482: A community with special collective rights . Language can also be considered as scientific knowledge in topics such as medicine, philosophy, botany, and more. It reflects a community's practices when dealing with the environment and each other. When a language is lost, this knowledge is often lost as well. In contrast, language revitalization is correlated with better health outcomes in indigenous communities. During language loss—sometimes referred to as obsolescence in

1430-487: A daily basis and at home during the 19th century (especially after the 1831 November Uprising and the 1863 January Uprising ) gradually returned back to the Lithuanian language. Before the 1930s, Italian was the only official language of Malta, although it was spoken only by the upper class, with Maltese being spoken by the lower class. Even though English has replaced Italian as a co-official language alongside Maltese,

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1560-443: A declaration of anthropologists (among them was Claude Lévi-Strauss ) and other scientists in 1950 and concluding with the 1978 Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice . In 1955, the Republic of South Africa withdrew from UNESCO saying that some of the organization's publications amounted to "interference" in the country's "racial problems". It rejoined the organization in 1994 under the leadership of Nelson Mandela . One of

1690-468: A dominant position in a country. Speakers of endangered languages may themselves come to associate their language with negative values such as poverty, illiteracy and social stigma, causing them to wish to adopt the dominant language that is associated with social and economical progress and modernity . Immigrants moving into an area may lead to the endangerment of the autochthonous language. Dialects and accents have seen similar levels of endangerment during

1820-501: A first language/dialect. Most Hong Kong residents prefer to communicate in Cantonese in daily life. Speakers of Mandarin Chinese and of Cantonese cannot mutually understand each other without learning the languages, due to vast differences in pronunciation, intonation, sentence structure and terminology. Furthermore, cultural differences between Hong Kong and China result in variations between

1950-427: A fraction of the world's linguistic diversity, therefore their picture of what human language is—and can be—will be limited. Some linguists consider linguistic diversity to be analogous to biological diversity, and compare language endangerment to wildlife endangerment . Linguists, members of endangered language communities, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and international organizations such as UNESCO and

2080-536: A full member. As a result, the United States withdrew its funding, which had accounted for about 22% of UNESCO's budget. Israel also reacted to Palestine's admittance to UNESCO by freezing Israeli payments to UNESCO and imposing sanctions on the Palestinian Authority , stating that Palestine's admittance would be detrimental "to potential peace talks". Two years after stopping payment of its dues to UNESCO,

2210-543: A global movement in 1990 to provide basic education for all children, youths and adults. In 2000, World Education Forum in Dakar , Senegal, led member governments to commit for achieving basic education for all in 2015. The World Declaration on Higher Education was adopted by UNESCO's World Conference on Higher Education on 9 October 1998, with the aim of setting global standards on the ideals and accessibility of higher education . UNESCO's early activities in culture included

2340-408: A language is unlikely to survive another generation and will soon be extinct. The fourth stage is moribund , followed by the fifth stage extinction . Many projects are under way aimed at preventing or slowing language loss by revitalizing endangered languages and promoting education and literacy in minority languages, often involving joint projects between language communities and linguists. Across

2470-677: A language shift in the population, with emigration and genocide (by the Nazis during World War II) playing only a minor role. Despite the withdrawal of Belarus from the USSR proclaimed in 1991, use of the Belarusian language is declining. According to the 2009 Belarusian population census, 72% of Belarusians speak Russian at home, and Belarusian is used by only 11.9% of Belarusians. 52.5% of Belarusians can speak and read Belarusian. Only 29.4% can speak, read and write it. One in ten Belarusians do not understand

2600-488: A larger cultural area. Michael Witzel refers to Ehret's model "which stresses the osmosis , or a "billiard ball," or Mallory 's Kulturkugel , effect of cultural transmission." According to Ehret, ethnicity and language can shift with relative ease in small societies, due to the cultural, economic and military choices made by the local population in question. The group bringing new traits may initially be small, contributing features that can be fewer in number than those of

2730-648: A larger sign language or dispersal of the deaf community) can lead to the endangerment and loss of their traditional sign language. Methods are being developed to assess the vitality of sign languages. While there is no definite threshold for identifying a language as endangered, UNESCO 's 2003 document entitled Language vitality and endangerment outlines nine factors for determining language vitality: Many languages, for example some in Indonesia , have tens of thousands of speakers but are endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are shifting to using

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2860-613: A member as well. The Constitution was amended in November 1954 when the General Conference resolved that members of the executive board would be representatives of the governments of the States of which they are nationals and would not, as before, act in their personal capacity. This change in governance distinguished UNESCO from its predecessor, the ICIC, in how member states would work together in

2990-439: A nearly universal cultural and identity marker of mestizos (people of mixed Spanish and Amerindian ancestry), and also of culturally assimilated , upwardly mobile Amerindian people. Paraguayan Guarani has been used throughout Paraguayan history as a symbol of nationalistic pride. Populist dictators such as José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia and Alfredo Stroessner used the language to appeal to common Paraguayans, and upon

3120-521: A non-state or pre-state context if the elite employs a specific combination of encouragements and punishments. Ethnohistorical cases ... demonstrate that small elite groups have successfully imposed their languages in non-state situations. Anthony gives the example of the Luo-speaking Acholi in northern Uganda in the 17th and 18th century, whose language spread rapidly in the 19th century. Anthony notes that "Indo-European languages probably spread in

3250-444: A platform for the dialogue between cultures and provide a forum for international debate". Since March 2006 it has been available free online, with limited printed issues. Its articles express the opinions of the authors which are not necessarily the opinions of UNESCO. There was a hiatus in publishing between 2012 and 2017. In 1950, UNESCO initiated the quarterly review Impact of Science on Society (also known as Impact ) to discuss

3380-464: A rise of monolingual French-speakers after 1910. Halfway through the 20th century, the number of monolingual French-speakers began to predominate over the (mostly) bilingual Flemish inhabitants. Only since the 1960s, after the establishment of the Belgian language border and the socio-economic development of Flanders took full effect, could Dutch use stem the tide of increasing French use. French remains

3510-507: A similar way among the tribal societies of prehistoric Europe", carried forward by "Indo-European chiefs" and their "ideology of political clientage". Anthony notes that "elite recruitment" may be a suitable term for this system. In urban settings, language change occurs due to the combination of three factors: the diversity of languages spoken, the high population density, and the need for communication. Urban vernaculars, urban contact varieties, and multiethnolects emerge in many cities around

3640-406: A social strategy through which individuals and groups compete for positions of prestige, power, and domestic security ... What is important, then, is not just dominance, but vertical social mobility and a linkage between language and access to positions of prestige and power ... A relatively small immigrant elite population can encourage widespread language shift among numerically dominant indigenes in

3770-540: A wholesale language shift, with islanders changing their language practices to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65 percent of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a small minority, perhaps 10 percent, used Corsican as a first language. In Southern Schleswig , an area that belonged to Denmark until the Second Schleswig War , there

3900-441: Is potential endangerment . This is when a language faces strong external pressure, but there are still communities of speakers who pass the language to their children. The second stage is endangerment . Once a language has reached the endangerment stage, there are only a few speakers left and children are, for the most part, not learning the language. The third stage of language extinction is seriously endangered . During this stage,

4030-514: Is a shift towards Urdu in almost all domains. Pashtuns and other minorities in northern Pakistan use Urdu as a replacement for former native languages. Guarani, an indigenous language of South America belonging to the Tupi–Guarani family of the Tupian languages , and specifically the primary variety known as Paraguayan Guarani ( endonym avañe'ẽ [aʋãɲẽˈʔẽ] ; 'the people's language'),

Endangered language - Misplaced Pages Continue

4160-451: Is also sometimes referred to as language revival or reversing language shift . For case studies of this process, see Anderson (2014). Applied linguistics and education are helpful in revitalizing endangered languages. Vocabulary and courses are available online for a number of endangered languages. Language maintenance refers to the support given to languages that need for their survival to be protected from outsiders who can ultimately affect

4290-490: Is another example of an early major UNESCO project in the field of natural sciences. In 1968, UNESCO organized the first intergovernmental conference aimed at reconciling the environment and development, a problem that continues to be addressed in the field of sustainable development . The main outcome of the 1968 conference was the creation of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme . UNESCO has been credited with

4420-450: Is corrupted and manipulated by Israel's enemies... we are not going to be a member of an organisation that deliberately acts against us". 2023 saw Russia excluded from the executive committee for the first time, after failing to get sufficient votes. The United States stated its intent to rejoin UNESCO in 2023, 5 years after leaving, and to pay its $ 600 million in back dues. The United States

4550-461: Is governed by the General Conference composed of member states and associate members, which meets biannually to set the agency's programs and budget. It also elects members of the executive board, which manages UNESCO's work, and appoints every four years a Director-General, who serves as UNESCO's chief administrator. UNESCO and its mandate for international cooperation can be traced back to a League of Nations resolution on 21 September 1921, to elect

4680-461: Is mainly occurring among Javanese people and in districts where Javanese is the dominant language, which is not what was expected. Another study suggests Javanese youths do not value Javanese language and culture as much as the national Indonesian language and culture because they perceive them as outdated and incompatible with modern society. An example is the shift from Canaanite and Phoenician and Hebrew to Aramaic in and around Jerusalem during

4810-523: Is one of the official languages of Paraguay (along with Spanish ), where it is spoken by the majority of the population, and where half of the rural population is monolingual. Guarani is one of the most-widely spoken indigenous languages of the Americas and the only one whose speakers include a large proportion of non-indigenous people. This represents a unique anomaly in the Americas, where language shift towards European colonial languages has otherwise been

4940-573: Is used in art and in everyday life. Instances of language shift appear to have occurred twice in the history of the Parthian Empire : once before its foundation, when the Parni invaded Parthia , eventually losing their Eastern Middle Iranian language and adopting Parthian instead; secondly, after the fall of the Parthian Empire, Parthian speakers shifted to Middle Persian or Armenian . In

5070-801: The Acropolis of Athens (Greece). The organization's work on heritage led to the adoption, in 1972, of the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. In 1976, the World Heritage Committee was established and the first sites were included on the World Heritage List in 1978. Since then important legal instruments on cultural heritage and diversity have been adopted by UNESCO member states in 2003 (Convention for

5200-469: The African Great Lakes region and the other group settling in southern Ethiopia. There, the early Daasanach Nilotes would have come into contact with a Cushitic-speaking population, and eventually adopted this group's Afro-Asiatic language. Finland still has coastal Swedish-speaking enclaves , unlike Estonia where the last coastal Swedes were decimated or escaped to Sweden in 1944. As Finland

5330-521: The Bhumij language is one of the endangered languages of India. Indonesia is one of the most multilingual and multiethnic nations in the world. There is language shift of first language into Indonesian from other language in Indonesia caused by ethnic diversity than urbanicity. Regardless of urbanicity, Indonesian speakers are more prevalent in urban areas than rural ones. The study found that language shift

Endangered language - Misplaced Pages Continue

5460-491: The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages , there are four main types of causes of language endangerment: Causes that put the populations that speak the languages in physical danger, such as: Causes that prevent or discourage speakers from using a language, such as: Often multiple of these causes act at the same time. Poverty, disease and disasters often affect minority groups disproportionately, for example causing

5590-751: The International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia , launched in 1960. The purpose of the campaign was to move the Great Temple of Abu Simbel to keep it from being swamped by the Nile after the construction of the Aswan Dam . During the 20-year campaign, 22 monuments and architectural complexes were relocated. This was the first and largest in a series of campaigns including Mohenjo-daro (Pakistan), Fes (Morocco), Kathmandu (Nepal), Borobudur (Indonesia) and

5720-951: The Jōmon Venus of Japan, the Mona Lisa of France, the Gebel el-Arak Knife of Egypt , The Ninth Wave of Russia, the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük of Turkey, the David (Michelangelo) of Italy, the Mathura Herakles of India, the Manunggul Jar of the Philippines, the Crown of Baekje of South Korea, The Hay Wain of the United Kingdom and the Benin Bronzes of Nigeria. The second proposed list will focus on

5850-706: The Northwest Pacific Plateau . Other hotspots are Oklahoma and the Southern Cone of South America. Almost all of the study of language endangerment has been with spoken languages. A UNESCO study of endangered languages does not mention sign languages. However, some sign languages are also endangered, such as Alipur Village Sign Language (AVSL) of India, Adamorobe Sign Language of Ghana, Ban Khor Sign Language of Thailand, and Plains Indian Sign Language . Many sign languages are used by small communities; small changes in their environment (such as contact with

5980-454: The Philippines , Spanish -speaking families have gradually switched over to Tagalog or English since the end of World War II , so Spanish has ceased to be a practical everyday language in the country and is on the verge of extinction . UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO ; pronounced / j uː ˈ n ɛ s k oʊ / ) is

6110-525: The Sardinian population since then, the majority of the locals switched over to such politically dominant language and no longer speak their native ones, which have seen steady decline in use. The language has been in fact severely compromised to the point that only 13% of the children are able to speak it, and today is mostly kept as a heritage language . With the exception of a few sparsely populated areas where Sardinian can still be heard for everyday purposes,

6240-664: The Siwa Oasis , a local variety of Berber is also used alongside Arabic. In Ethiopia , various populations of Nilotic origin have shifted languages over the centuries, adopting the idioms of their Afro-Asiatic-speaking neighbors in the northern areas. Among these groups are the Daasanach or Marille, who today speak the Daasanach language . It belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. However, modern genetic analysis of

6370-428: The United Nations member states (except Israel and Liechtenstein ), as well as Cook Islands , Niue and Palestine . The United States and Israel left UNESCO on 31 December 2018, but the United States rejoined in 2023. As of June 2023 , there have been 11 Directors-General of UNESCO since its inception – nine men and two women. The 11 Directors-General of UNESCO have come from six regions within

6500-414: The abduction of British women by Vikings to Iceland ) causes immigration of at least some men, who are perceived to be of higher status than local men. Then, in mixed-language marriages, children would speak the "higher-status" language, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today. Assimilation is the process whereby a speech-community becomes bilingual and gradually shifts allegiance to

6630-603: The catechism in Flemish in many parishes. Nonetheless, since French enjoyed a much higher status than Dutch, from about the interbellum onward, everybody became bilingual, the generation born after World War II being raised exclusively in French. In the countryside, the passing on of Flemish stopped during the 1930s or 1940s. Consequently, the vast majority of those still having an active command of Flemish are older than 60. Therefore, complete extinction of French Flemish can be expected in

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6760-610: The national language (e.g. Indonesian ) in place of local languages. In contrast, a language with only 500 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the primary language of a community, and is the first (or only) spoken language of all children in that community. Asserting that "Language diversity is essential to the human heritage", UNESCO's Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages offers this definition of an endangered language: "... when its speakers cease to use it, use it in an increasingly reduced number of communicative domains, and cease to pass it on from one generation to

6890-472: The 1820s, around 97% of the inhabitants south of the line Villach - Klagenfurt - Diex spoke Slovene as their native language. In the course of the 19th century, this number fell significantly. By 1920, a third of the population of the area had already shifted to German as their main language of communication. After the Carinthian Plebiscite in the 1920s, and especially after World War II , most of

7020-525: The 1920s and only 6% in the 1980s. Since the 1980s, monolingual speakers are no longer attested. On the 27 October 2015, the Senate rejected the draft law on ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages driving away the assumption of Congress for the adoption of the constitutional reform which would have given value and legitimacy to regional languages such as Breton. Corsican

7150-450: The 1940s and 50s, these dialects rapidly vanished. Most of Hong Kong's younger generation does not understand, let alone speak, their ancestral dialects. Beginning in the late 1990s, since Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty, Mandarin Chinese has been more widely implemented in education and many other areas of official society. Though Mandarin Chinese has been quickly adopted into society, most Hong Kong residents would not regard it as

7280-523: The 19th century, especially in the second half of it, Dutch was banned from all levels of education and lost most of its functions as a cultural language. The larger cities had become predominantly French-speaking by the end of the 19th century. However, in the countryside, many elementary schools continued to teach in Dutch until World War I , and the Roman Catholic Church continued to preach and teach

7410-467: The 21st century due to similar reasons. Language endangerment affects both the languages themselves and the people that speak them. This also affects the essence of a culture. As communities lose their language, they often lose parts of their cultural traditions that are tied to that language. Examples include songs, myths, poetry, local remedies, ecological and geological knowledge, as well as language behaviors that are not easily translated. Furthermore,

7540-501: The Beijing dialect of Mandarin by the 19th century and the only Manchu speakers were garrisons left in their homeland of Heilongjiang . Today there are fewer than 100 native speakers of Manchu. At the current time, language shift is occurring all across China. Many languages of minority ethnic groups are declining, as well as the many regional varieties of Chinese . Generally the shift is in favour of Standard Chinese ( Mandarin ), but in

7670-495: The Belarusian language. In the last two centuries, Brussels has transformed from an exclusively Dutch-speaking city to a bilingual city with French as the majority language and lingua franca . The language shift began in the 18th century and accelerated as Belgium became independent and Brussels expanded out past its original city boundaries. From 1880 on, more and more Dutch-speaking people became bilingual, resulting in

7800-736: The Cantonese used in Hong Kong and that in Canton Province. In Egypt , the Coptic language , a descendant of the Afro-Asiatic Egyptian language , has been in decline in usage since the time of the Arab conquest in the 7th century. By the 17th century, it was eventually supplanted as a spoken language by Egyptian Arabic . Coptic is today mainly used by the Coptic Church as a liturgical language. In

7930-696: The Daasanach indicates that they are more closely related to Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo -speaking populations inhabiting Tanzania than they are to the Cushitic and Semitic Afro-Asiatic-speaking populations of Ethiopia. This suggests that the Daasanach were originally Nilo-Saharan speakers, sharing common origins with the Pokot . In the 19th century, the Nilotic ancestors of these two populations are believed to have begun separate migrations, with one group heading southwards into

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8060-819: The Directors-General of UNESCO since its establishment in 1946 is as follows: This is the list of the sessions of the UNESCO General Conference held since 1946: Ahmet Altay Cengizer Biennial elections are held, with 58 elected representatives holding office for four years. [REDACTED]   Finland [REDACTED]   Portugal [REDACTED]   Turkey [REDACTED]   Albania [REDACTED]   Belarus [REDACTED]   Bulgaria [REDACTED]   Cuba [REDACTED]   Grenada [REDACTED]   Jamaica [REDACTED]   Saint Lucia [REDACTED]   Saint Vincent and

8190-463: The Dutch origin of several town names in the region, such as that of 'Dunkerque' ( Dunkirk ) which is a French phonetic rendition of the original Dutch name 'Duinkerke' (meaning 'church in the dunes'). The linguistic situation did not change dramatically until the French Revolution in 1789, and Dutch continued to fulfill the main functions of a cultural language throughout the 18th century. During

8320-612: The European Union are actively working to save and stabilize endangered languages. Once a language is determined to be endangered, there are three steps that can be taken in order to stabilize or rescue the language. The first is language documentation, the second is language revitalization and the third is language maintenance. Language documentation is the documentation in writing and audio-visual recording of grammar , vocabulary, and oral traditions (e.g. stories, songs, religious texts) of endangered languages. It entails producing descriptive grammars, collections of texts and dictionaries of

8450-438: The Italian-speaking population has since grown, but the growth of English in the country now threatens the status of Maltese. A trend among the younger generations is to mix English and Italian vocabulary patterns, in making new Maltese words. For example, the Maltese word bibljoteka has been overtaken by librerija , formed from library with an Italian ending. In addition to mixing English with Italian, Maltenglish involves

8580-411: The League of Nations essentially centred on Western Europe ). The International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) was then created in Paris in September 1924, to act as the executing agency for the ICIC. However, the onset of World War II largely interrupted the work of these predecessor organizations. As for private initiatives, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) began to work as

8710-471: The Middle Ages, the territory of Lithuanian language was reaching vicinities of Łomża , Tykocin and Białystok , but shrank to the north – to the rural outskirts of Sejny , Punsk and Wiżajny before the 1900s as a consequence of acculturation . The Polish-speaking island to the north of Kaunas and south of Panevėžys almost fully disappeared between the 1920s and the 1940s, as the local Lithuanian population, who increasingly began to speak Polish on

8840-442: The Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage ) and 2005 ( Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions ). An intergovernmental meeting of UNESCO in Paris in December 1951 led to the creation of the European Council for Nuclear Research , which was responsible for establishing the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) later on, in 1954. Arid Zone programming, 1948–1966,

8970-409: The U.S. as experts aiming to share their knowledge and expand their skills". Language shift Language shift , also known as language transfer , language replacement or language assimilation , is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be of higher-status stabilize or spread at

9100-431: The United States and Israel lost UNESCO voting rights in 2013 without losing the right to be elected; thus, the United States was elected as a member of the executive board for the period 2016–19. In 2019, Israel left UNESCO after 69 years of membership, with Israel's ambassador to the UN Danny Danon writing: "UNESCO is the body that continually rewrites history, including by erasing the Jewish connection to Jerusalem... it

9230-401: The advent of Paraguayan democracy in 1992, Guarani was enshrined in the new constitution as a co-equal language along with Spanish. Jopara , the mixture of Spanish and Guarani, is spoken by an estimated 90% of the population of Paraguay. Code-switching between the two languages takes place on a spectrum where more Spanish is used for official and business-related matters, whereas more Guarani

9360-510: The already local culture. The emerging combined group may then initiate a recurrent, expansionist process of ethnic and language shift. David Anthony notes that the spread of the Indo-European languages probably did not happen through "chain-type folk migrations", but by the introduction of these languages by ritual and political elites, which are emulated by large groups of people. Anthony explains: Language shift can be understood best as

9490-480: The cities or to other countries, thus dispersing the speakers. Cultural dominance occurs when literature and higher education is only accessible in the majority language. Political dominance occurs when education and political activity is carried out exclusively in a majority language. Historically, in colonies, and elsewhere where speakers of different languages have come into contact, some languages have been considered superior to others: often one language has attained

9620-858: The city's predominant language, while Dutch is spoken by a minority. Historically, one of the most important language shifts in China has been the near disappearance of the Manchu language . When China was ruled by the Qing dynasty , whose Emperors were Manchu, Chinese and Manchu had co-official status, and the Emperor heavily subsidized and promoted education in Manchu, but because most of the Manchu Eight Banners lived in garrisons with Mandarin-speaking Han Bannermen located across Han Chinese civilian populated cities, most Manchus spoke

9750-661: The coming decades. The French Basque Country has been subject to intense French-language pressure exerted over the Basque-speaking communities. In the late 1800s, the Basque language was both persecuted and excluded from administration and official public use during the takeover of the National Convention , during the War of the Pyrenees , and during the Napoleonic period . The compulsory national education system imposed early on

9880-715: The commission, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Seán MacBride ). The same year, UNESCO created the International Programme for the Development of Communication (IPDC), a multilateral forum designed to promote media development in developing countries. In 1993, UNESCO's General Conference endorsed the Windhoek Declaration on media independence and pluralism, which led the UN General Assembly to declare

10010-564: The contributions of linguists globally. Ethnologue's 2005 count of languages in its database, excluding duplicates in different countries, was 6,912, of which 32.8% (2,269) were in Asia, and 30.3% (2,092) in Africa. This contemporary tally must be regarded as a variable number within a range. Areas with a particularly large number of languages that are nearing extinction include: Eastern Siberia , Central Siberia , Northern Australia , Central America , and

10140-458: The cycles of language death and emergence of new languages through creolization as a continuous ongoing process. A majority of linguists do consider that language loss is an ethical problem, as they consider that most communities would prefer to maintain their languages if given a real choice. They also consider it a scientific problem, because language loss on the scale currently taking place will mean that future linguists will only have access to

10270-525: The date of its adoption, 3 May, as World Press Freedom Day . Since 1997, UNESCO has awarded the UNESCO / Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize every 3 May. UNESCO admitted Palestine as a member in 2011. Laws passed in the United States after Palestine applied for UNESCO and WHO membership in April 1989 mean that the United States cannot contribute financially to any UN organization that accepts Palestine as

10400-481: The diffusion of national science bureaucracies. In the field of communication, the "free flow of ideas by word and image" has been in UNESCO's constitution since it was established, following the experience of the Second World War when control of information was a factor in indoctrinating populations for aggression. In the years immediately following World War II, efforts were concentrated on reconstruction and on

10530-408: The dispersal of speaker populations and decreased survival rates for those who stay behind. Among the causes of language endangerment cultural, political and economic marginalization accounts for most of the world's language endangerment. Scholars distinguish between several types of marginalization: Economic dominance negatively affects minority languages when poverty leads people to migrate towards

10660-510: The earliest is GIDS (Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale) proposed by Joshua Fishman in 1991. In 2011 an entire issue of Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development was devoted to the study of ethnolinguistic vitality, Vol. 32.2, 2011, with several authors presenting their own tools for measuring language vitality. A number of other published works on measuring language vitality have been published, prepared by authors with varying situations and applications in mind. According to

10790-553: The early work of UNESCO in the education field was a pilot project on fundamental education in the Marbial Valley, Haiti, which was launched in 1947. Following this project one of expert missions to other countries, included a 1949 mission to Afghanistan. UNESCO recommended in 1948 that Member countries should make free primary education compulsory and universal. The World Conference on Education for All , in Jomtien , Thailand, started

10920-620: The expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be of lower-status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin during the time of the Roman Empire . For prehistory , Forster et al . (2004) and Forster and Renfrew (2011) observe that there is a correlation of language shift with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not necessarily with intrusive female mtDNA . They conclude that technological innovation (the transition from hunting-gathering to farming , or from stone to metal tools) or military prowess (as in

11050-431: The family, while 68% with friends. A much lower percentage reported to use it at work (35%); the local language is less used in formal situations. However, the frequency of use within the family networks and friendship stopped respectively at -4 and -11 percentage points, suggesting a slow morphing to Italian, while the use in the workplace dropped to -22 percentage points. A visible generational gap has also been noted, since

11180-668: The federal state of Schleswig-Holstein . Cumans , seeking refuge from the Mongols , settled in Hungary and were later Magyarized . The Jassic people of Hungary originally spoke the Jassic dialect of Ossetic , but they fully adopted Magyar , forgetting their former language. The territory of today's Hungary was formerly settled by Slavonic tribes, which gradually assimilated to Magyar. Also, language shift may have happened in Hungarian pre-history, as

11310-526: The identification of needs for means of mass communication around the world. UNESCO started organizing training and education for journalists in the 1950s. In response to calls for a " New World Information and Communication Order " in the late 1970s, UNESCO established the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, which produced the 1980 MacBride report (named after the chair of

11440-529: The influence of science on society. The journal ceased publication in 1992. UNESCO also published Museum International Quarterly from the year 1948. UNESCO has official relations with 322 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Most of these are what UNESCO calls "operational"; a select few are "formal". The highest form of affiliation to UNESCO is "formal associate", and the 22 NGOs with formal associate (ASC) relations occupying offices at UNESCO are: The institutes are specialized departments of

11570-552: The island's indigenous languages have by now been therefore largely replaced by Italian; the language contact ultimately resulted in the emergence of a specific variety of Italian , slightly divergent from the standard one. Due to language shift, ethnographic borders of Lithuanian language from the Middle Ages to the late 1930s shrank sharply to the north and west from the territory what is now Grodno oblast in Belarus , giving way to

11700-414: The languages, and it requires the establishment of a secure archive where the material can be stored once it is produced so that it can be accessed by future generations of speakers or scientists. Language revitalization is the process by which a language community through political, community, and educational means attempts to increase the number of active speakers of the endangered language. This process

11830-487: The late 19th century. Since the times of the Renaissance , a trans-Italian language was developed in central Italy , based on Florentine Tuscan ; in light of its cultural prestige, it was used for formal, literary and written purposes among the literate classes from the various states of mainland Italy, Sicily and Corsica (France), sidelining the other dialects in education and formal settings. Thus, literary Florentine

11960-444: The linguistic literature—the language that is being lost generally undergoes changes as speakers make their language more similar to the language that they are shifting to. For example, gradually losing grammatical or phonological complexities that are not found in the dominant language. Generally the accelerated pace of language endangerment is considered to be a problem by linguists and by the speakers. However, some linguists, such as

12090-426: The local dialects ( Basilicata , 69.4%; Calabria 68.6%; Campania, 75.2%; Sicily, 68.8%). Trentino 's Cimbrian , a Germanic language related to Bavarian , was spoken by at least 20,000 people in the 19th century, with 3,762 people in 1921 and fewer than 300 in 2007. The same scenario goes for Mòcheno and Walser . Unlike the neighbouring island of Corsica (France) and elsewhere in today's Italy, where Italian

12220-503: The loss of linguistic diversity and cultural heritage within affected communities. The general consensus is that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages currently spoken. Some linguists estimate that between 50% and 90% of them will be severely endangered or dead by the year 2100. The 20 most common languages , each with more than 50 million speakers, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, but most languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. The first step towards language death

12350-672: The mixed language Petuh combining Danish and German elements. As late as in 1851 (in the period of nationalization) the Danish government tried to stop the language shift, but without success in the long run. After the Second Schleswig War the Prussians introduced a number of language policy measures in the opposite direction to expand the use of (High) German as the language of administration, schooling and church services. Today, Danish and North Frisian are recognized as minority languages in

12480-578: The native Germanic dialect has been declining after a period of being banned at school by the French government after the First World War and the Second World War . It is being replaced by French. French Flanders , which gradually became part of France between 1659 and 1678, was historically part of the Dutch sprachraum , the native dialect being West Flemish ( French Flemish ). This is corroborated by

12610-687: The necessity for an international organization was expressed in the Moscow Declaration, agreed upon by China , the United Kingdom, the United States and the USSR. This was followed by the Dumbarton Oaks Conference proposals of 9 October 1944. Upon the proposal of CAME and in accordance with the recommendations of the United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO), held in San Francisco from April to June 1945,

12740-454: The next. That is, there are no new speakers, adults or children." UNESCO operates with four levels of language endangerment between "safe" (not endangered) and "extinct" (no living speakers), based on intergenerational transfer: "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (children not speaking), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), and "critically endangered" (spoken by few members of

12870-479: The number of speakers of a language. UNESCO seeks to prevent language extinction by promoting and supporting the language in education, culture, communication and information, and science. Another option is "post-vernacular maintenance": the teaching of some words and concepts of the lost language, rather than revival proper. As of June 2012 the United States has a J-1 specialist visa , which allows indigenous language experts who do not have academic training to enter

13000-720: The oldest generation, often semi-speakers ). UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger categorises 2,473 languages by level of endangerment. Using an alternative scheme of classification, linguist Michael E. Krauss defines languages as "safe" if it is considered that children will probably be speaking them in 100 years; "endangered" if children will probably not be speaking them in 100 years (approximately 60–80% of languages fall into this category) and "moribund" if children are not speaking them now. Many scholars have devised techniques for determining whether languages are endangered. One of

13130-582: The organization that support UNESCO's programme, providing specialized support for cluster and national offices. UNESCO awards 26 prizes in education, natural sciences, social and human sciences, culture, communication and information as well as peace: International Days observed at UNESCO are provided in the table below: As of July 2023 , UNESCO has 194 member states and 12 associate members. Some members are not independent states and some members have additional National Organizing Committees from some of their dependent territories . UNESCO state parties are

13260-550: The organization's fields of competence. As member states worked together over time to realize UNESCO's mandate, political and historical factors have shaped the organization's operations in particular during the Cold War , the decolonization process, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union . Among the major achievements of the organization is its work against racism, for example through influential statements on race starting with

13390-466: The organization: West Europe (5), Central America (1), North America (2), West Africa (1), East Asia (1), and East Europe (1). To date, there has been no elected Director-General from the remaining ten regions within UNESCO: Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central and North Asia, Middle East, North Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, South Africa, Australia-Oceania, and South America. The list of

13520-533: The perception of population as Lithuanian language was seen as of lower status by its peripheral speakers as well as deliberate policy by German and Russian imperial administrations, notably – a 40-year ban on Lithuanian language and press by the Tsarist government . In Lithuania Minor , where Lithuanian culture began to decline after The Great Plague between 1708 and 1711, Kristijonas Donelaitis ' poem – The Seasons addressed this issue. In Northern Poland during

13650-454: The phonetician Peter Ladefoged , have argued that language death is a natural part of the process of human cultural development, and that languages die because communities stop speaking them for their own reasons. Ladefoged argued that linguists should simply document and describe languages scientifically, but not seek to interfere with the processes of language loss. A similar view has been argued at length by linguist Salikoko Mufwene , who sees

13780-399: The population shifted from Slovene to German. In the same region, today only some 13% of the people speak Slovene, while more than 85% of the population speak German. The figures for the whole region are equally telling: in 1818, around 35% of the population of Carinthia spoke Slovene; by 1910, this number had fallen to 15.6% and by 2001 to 2.3%. These changes were almost entirely the result of

13910-461: The prehistoric culture of Magyars shows very little similarity to that of speakers of other Uralic languages . In India, many languages are assimilated into standard language like Hindi , Bengali and other administrative languages. For example, the Austroasiatic -speaking Bhumij tribe for over two centuries nearly abandoned their native language and adopted Bengali and Odia instead. Today,

14040-459: The prewar era and especially the postwar era and the "escape from the countryside" of the 1960s changed the demography of the major cities and led to Finnish dominating. While Helsinki was a predominantly Swedish-speaking city prior to the turn of the 20th century, the Swedish-speaking minority is now about 6% of the population. In Alsace , France , a longtime Alsatian -speaking region,

14170-431: The province of Guangdong the cultural influence of Cantonese has meant local dialects and languages are being abandoned for Cantonese instead. Languages like Tujia and Evenki are also disappearing due to language shift. In Hong Kong , Cantonese has become the dominant language spoken in society since widespread immigration to Hong Kong began in the 1940s. With immigrants of differing mother tongues, communication

14300-626: The region's linguistic heritage. Like the aforementioned case of Northeast Italy, even in Southern Italy and Sicily the local dialects from the Italo-Dalmatian family are widely used in combination with standard Italian, depending upon the social context. More specifically, Italian as the prevalent language spoken among family members is spoken the least in Campania (20.7%), Calabria (25.3%) and Sicily (26.6%), contrary to frequency of use of

14430-454: The second language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of the speech-community that speaks the second language more often at home. The data are used to measure the use of a given language in the lifetime of a person, or most often across generations. When a speech-community ceases to use their original language, language death is said to occur. In the context of the Indo-European migrations, it has been noted that small groups can change

14560-661: The social structure of one's community is often reflected through speech and language behavior. This pattern is even more prominent in dialects. This may in turn affect the sense of identity of the individual and the community as a whole, producing a weakened social cohesion as their values and traditions are replaced with new ones. This is sometimes characterized as anomie . Losing a language may also have political consequences as some countries confer different political statuses or privileges on minority ethnic groups, often defining ethnicity in terms of language. In turn, communities that lose their language may also lose political legitimacy as

14690-583: The southern parts of Schleswig. Added to this was the influence of German-speaking Holsatian nobility and traders. German was (occasionally) also spoken at the royal court in Copenhagen. This political and economic development led gradually to a German language dominating in the southern parts of Schleswig. Native dialects such as the Angel Danish and Eiderstedt Frisian vanished. In the Flensburg area, there arose

14820-487: The spreading Polish and Belarusian languages , while in Prussian Lithuania out of 10 administrative units with prevailing Lithuanian language in the early 1800s, only the extreme northern part – Klaipėda region had still relative Lithuanian language majority in the 1910s with all the eastern and southern territories in some hundred or so years almost fully Germanized . These processes were happening both because of

14950-524: The students and young people under the age of 25 are the social group where the use of dialect fell below the threshold of absolute majority (respectively 43 and 41%). Nonetheless, despite some tendencies signalling the slow advancement of standard Italian, the local dialects of Veneto and the Province of Trieste are still widely spoken alongside Italian; like in much of Italy, the presence of Italian in Northeast Italy does not seem to take anything away from

15080-613: The time of Classical Antiquity. Another example is during the Middle Ages, when shifting from Aramaic to Arabic through the advent of Islam. A third shift took place in Modern times, under the influence of Zionism , from Jewish languages such as Yiddish , Ladino and various dialects of Judeo-Arabic to Modern Hebrew . The Italian peninsula , the Po river basin and the nearby islands are home to various languages , most of which are Latin-derived. Italy would be politically organized into states until

15210-486: The use of English words in Maltese sentences. Trends show that English is becoming the language of choice for more and more people, and is transforming the Maltese language. Urdu, the lingua franca of South Asian Muslims and the official and national language of Pakistan since its independence, is spoken by most educated Pakistanis . Despite positive attitudes towards Punjabi in the urban areas of Pakistani Punjab , there

15340-449: The world as a result of language change in urban settings. These factors lead to phenomena such as dialect levelling, koineization , and/or language shift toward a dominant language. Historical examples for status shift are the early Welsh and Lutheran Bible translations . Until the mid-19th century, southern Carinthia in Austria had an overwhelming Slovene -speaking majority: in

15470-457: The world is not known, and it is not well defined what constitutes a separate language as opposed to a dialect. Estimates vary depending on the extent and means of the research undertaken, and the definition of a distinct language and the current state of knowledge of remote and isolated language communities. The number of known languages varies over time as some of them become extinct and others are newly discovered. An accurate number of languages in

15600-416: The world was not yet known until the use of universal, systematic surveys in the later half of the twentieth century. The majority of linguists in the early twentieth century refrained from making estimates. Before then, estimates were frequently the product of guesswork and very low. One of the most active research agencies is SIL International , which maintains a database, Ethnologue , kept up to date by

15730-510: The world's living species, such as the komodo dragon of Indonesia, the panda of China, the bald eagle of North American countries, the aye-aye of Madagascar, the Asiatic lion of India, the kākāpō of New Zealand, and the mountain tapir of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. UNESCO and its specialized institutions issue a number of magazines. Created in 1945, The UNESCO Courier magazine states its mission to "promote UNESCO's ideals, maintain

15860-413: The world, many countries have enacted specific legislation aimed at protecting and stabilizing the language of indigenous speech communities . Recognizing that most of the world's endangered languages are unlikely to be revitalized, many linguists are also working on documenting the thousands of languages of the world about which little or nothing is known. The total number of contemporary languages in

15990-586: Was a language shift from the 17th to the 20th centuries from Danish and North Frisian dialects to Low German and later High German. Historically, most of the region was part of the Danish and North Frisian language area, adjacent in the south to the German-speaking Holstein. But with the Reformation in the 16th century German became the language of the Church, and in the 19th century also that of schools in

16120-571: Was established as the most representative dialect of Italy long before its political unification in 1861, Tuscan having been officially adopted by the preunitarian states. Italian further expanded as a common language for everyday use throughout the country after World War II. Most other languages, with the exception of those spoken by specific ethno-linguistic groups , long served as local vernaculars alongside Italian; therefore they have been mislabelled "dialects" by their own speakers, but they are still usually spoken just as much as standard Italian in

16250-896: Was founded in 1945 as the successor to the League of Nations ' International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation . UNESCO's founding mission, which was shaped by the events of World War II , is to advance peace , sustainable development and human rights by facilitating collaboration and dialogue among nations. It pursues this objective through five major programme areas: education, natural sciences , social / human sciences , culture and communication/information. UNESCO sponsors projects that improve literacy , provide technical training and education, advance science, protect independent media and press freedom , preserve regional and cultural history , and promote cultural diversity . The organization prominently helps establish and secure World Heritage Sites of cultural and natural importance. UNESCO

16380-467: Was hard without a dominant language. Cantonese originated from the capital of neighboring Canton province, and it became the dominant language by extension, and other similar dialects started to vanish from use in Hong Kong. Original residents, or aboriginals, of Hong Kong used their own languages including the Tanka , Hakka and Waitau dialect , but with a majority of Hong Kong's population being immigrants by

16510-521: Was long employed as a conglomerate of local vernaculars in combination with Italian , the official language in Corsica until 1859; afterwards Italian was replaced by French, owing to the acquisition of the island by France from Genoa in 1768. Over the next two centuries, the use of French grew to the extent that, by the Liberation in 1945, all islanders had a working knowledge of French. The 20th century saw

16640-577: Was readmitted by the UNESCO General Conference that July. UNESCO implements its activities through five programme areas: education, natural sciences, social and human sciences, culture, and communication and information. UNESCO does not accredit institutions of higher learning. The UNESCO transparency portal has been designed to enable public access to information regarding the Organization's activities, such as its aggregate budget for

16770-522: Was the standard language shared by the various local elites since the late Middle Ages, Italian was first officially introduced to Sardinia, to the detriment of both Spanish and Sardinian (the only surviving Neo-Latin language from the Southern branch ), only in 1760 and 1764 by the then-ruling House of Savoy , from Piedmont . Because of the promotion and enforcement of the Italian language and culture upon

16900-509: Was under Swedish rule from the Middle Ages until 1809, the language of education was Swedish , with Finnish being allowed as a medium of education at the university only in the 19th century, and the first thesis in Finnish being published in 1858. Several of the coastal cities were multilingual; Viipuri had newspapers in Swedish , Finnish , Russian and German . However, the industrialization in

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