Endangered Languages Around the World

Recently in my newsfeed, I came to see a note that 21st February was the International Mother Language celebration day, this “piqued my interest” further, so I started to read up on what the celebration was all about and it lead me into the area of Endangered Languages.

My family on my mother’s side is speaking a dying language named Meänkieli, which is spoken in the valley of the Torne River. Meänmaa (Meänkieli for ‘”Our Land”‘) is the name of this area in Meänkieli. I did not grow up in this area, I never learnt the language, and my mom was not interested in teaching it to me and my siblings even when we spend most summers in Meänmaa.

There were many times as a grown-up that I would have had use of knowing the Meänkieli language, I remember one time I was up there to visit family, my aunt took me to see my grandfathers brother, we could not communicate without my aunt, as my grandfather’s brother did not speak Swedish, he spoke Meänkieli and finish which I was not able to speak.

Why am I telling you this, Meänkieli happens to be one of the endangered languages and that lead me into getting more into how many endangered languages there are around the world. I built a data pipeline from a dataset I got from The Endangered Languages Database

Data Pipeline

The data pipeline is simple, I used Google Sheets and Google Data Studio to create this map.

The Data Pipeline Architecture

I imported the dataset I download from The Endangered Languages Database into Google Sheet, I did not do any data cleaning rather used the data as is, the only thing I did was to add a header line to the dataset in Google Sheet and put some column names in it.

Endangered Languages

I created a new report in Data Studio and connected Google Sheet as the dataset. The rest was just to select the bubble map and add the fields I wanted to use, I did have to change the geo-coordinates to be known in the Data Studio as a longitude, latitude field.

From the map I did as part of the analysis you can see that there are thousands of languages from around the world that are currently in danger of dying out. This is a sad trend, as languages provide an identity to cultures from where societies develop and language promotes interaction and bonding between people of a group, sharing the same languages might attenuate any potential conflict felt between people.

I could find that Meänkieli the language of my maternal family is an endangered language, which is sad, there is some hope that it will live on as Meänkieli is recognized as a minority language in Sweden and that there are TV programs being made in Meänkieli and other minority languages such as the Sámi languages.

Why Languages are Dying

Most languages die out gradually as successive generations of speakers become bilingual and then begin to lose proficiency in their mother languages. This often happens when speakers seek to learn a more-prestigious language in order to gain social and economic advantages or to avoid discrimination.

Globalization is another killer of languages, the dominating effect of GDP per capita, on speaker growth rate suggests that economic growth and globalization are primary drivers of recent language speaker declines, for more details this 2014 research paper can shade more light on how globalization affects languages.

I hope this was an eye-opener for you on the languages spoken around the world and how some of them are endangered. I will leave you with an eye-opener about which countries have the most linguistic diversity.

You will find more infographics at Statista