Endangered Language

An endangered language is one whose intergenerational transmission is breaking down: fewer children are acquiring it as a first language, and without intervention it will move toward language death. Endangerment is a continuum, not a binary state; the central diagnostic is whether the language is being passed to the next generation in the home.

Frameworks for Assessing Endangerment

Two related frameworks dominate. Fishman's Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS, 1991) ranks language vitality on eight levels, with the critical threshold at the boundary between languages still transmitted in the family (levels 6 and below) and those surviving only through institutional support without home transmission (levels 5 and above). A language at GIDS 8, spoken only by isolated elderly speakers, is effectively moribund.

Lewis and Simons (2010) expanded this into the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS), used by Ethnologue. EGIDS adds finer gradations at both ends, distinguishing for instance between languages used only orally in the home (level 6a, vigorous) from those where transmission is faltering (6b, threatened). UNESCO's framework, used in the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, classifies languages as safe, vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered, or extinct, based on factors including absolute number of speakers, proportion of speakers within the community, intergenerational transmission, and availability of teaching materials.

Indicators of Endangerment

Speaker numbers alone are misleading. A language with 500 speakers across all generations may be more secure than one with 50,000 speakers concentrated in the elderly. Diagnostic indicators include:

• Intergenerational transmission: are children acquiring the language at home?
• Absolute and proportional speaker numbers: how many speakers, and what fraction of the ethnic community still speaks it?
• Domain loss: is the language receding from public domains (work, education, media) into purely private ones?
• Speaker attitudes: do speakers value the language or associate it with stigma and economic disadvantage?
• Documentation: does the language have a writing system, dictionaries, grammars, recorded literature?
• Government and institutional support: are there policies that recognise, fund, or actively suppress the language?

Krauss (1992) argued that the most important single indicator is whether children are still learning the language. Once child acquisition stops, the language is on a closed trajectory regardless of how many adult speakers remain.

The Mechanisms of Endangerment

Endangerment is rarely caused by one factor. Nettle and Romaine (2000) describe it as the linguistic correlate of broader pressures: economic incorporation into wider markets, urbanisation, monolingual schooling, exposure to dominant-language media, and the political marginalisation of minority communities. The shift typically unfolds across three generations: grandparents are monolingual in the heritage language, parents are bilingual, children are dominant or monolingual in the majority language.

Speakers themselves often participate in the shift, calculating that the dominant language offers their children better economic and educational prospects. The choice is rational at the individual level but cumulatively destroys the speech community.

Revitalisation

Documentation alone does not save languages. Revitalisation requires re-establishing intergenerational transmission. Successful efforts (Hebrew, Welsh, Māori, Hawaiian) typically combine immersion schooling, family-level transmission, prestige domains for use (literature, broadcasting, government), and community institutions that make speaking the language socially rewarded. Hinton's master-apprentice programme pairs fluent elders with younger learners in domains of daily life. Fishman emphasised that without anchor in the family domain (GIDS 6), institutional support cannot sustain a language.

Implications for ELT

In contexts where English is being introduced into communities with minority or endangered local languages, instructional choices have ecological consequences. Subtractive English-medium education, where the local language is excluded from school, accelerates shift. Additive and bilingual models, where English is added alongside continued use of the home language across domains, are compatible with linguistic maintenance. The ELT practitioner is rarely a neutral party in this dynamic.

References

• Crystal, D. (2000). Language death. Cambridge University Press.
• Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Multilingual Matters.
• Krauss, M. (1992). The world's languages in crisis. Language, 68(1), 4-10.
• Lewis, M. P. & Simons, G. F. (2010). Assessing endangerment: Expanding Fishman's GIDS. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, 55(2), 103-120.
• Nettle, D. & Romaine, S. (2000). Vanishing voices: The extinction of the world's languages. Oxford University Press.
• UNESCO (2010). Atlas of the world's languages in danger (3rd ed.). UNESCO Publishing.