New & Growing Languages

While the number of languages in the world is declining, a handful of languages are being invented or revived. In other cases, endangered languages are being preserved before they become extinct. These efforts reflect the importance that groups place on language as an element of local culture.

Growing Languages

Hebrew is an example of a language that was once rarely used but is more commonly used now. Most of the Jewish Bible and Christian Old Testament were written in Hebrew. A language of daily activity in biblical times, Hebrew diminished in use in the fourth century B.C.E. and was thereafter retained primarily for Jewish religious services. At the time of Jesus, most people in present-day Israel spoke Aramaic, which in turn was replaced by Arabic.

When Israel was established as an independent country in 1948, Hebrew became one of the new country’s two official languages, along with Arabic (Figure 5-49). Since 2018, Hebrew has been the country’s only official language. Hebrew was chosen because the Jewish population of the State of Israel consisted of refugees and migrants from many countries who spoke many languages. Because Hebrew was still used in Jewish prayers, no other language could so symbolically unify the disparate cultural groups in the new country.

Hebrew

Sign at sea level in Hebrew, French, and English on the road between Jerusalem (754 meters or 2,474 feet above sea level) and the Dead Sea (431 meters or 1,412 feet below sea level).

The task of making Hebrew a modern language was formidable. Words had to be created for thousands of objects and inventions unknown in biblical times, such as telephones, cars, and electricity. The revival effort was initiated by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who lived in the Palestine region before the creation of the State of Israel and refused to speak any language other than Hebrew. Ben-Yehuda is credited with the invention of 4,000 new Hebrew words—related when possible to ancient ones—and the creation of the first modern Hebrew dictionary.

Pause & Reflect 5.4.4

What is an example of a recently invented word in English? What factors may have contributed to its invention?

Reviving Languages

The Miami Native American Tribe traditionally spoke the Myaamia language (listed in Ethnologue as Miami), bringing it with them until after their forced migration in the nineteenth century from their ancestral homelands in the Lower Great Lakes to northeastern Oklahoma. The last native speakers died in the 1960s.

Daryl Baldwin, a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Ohio, has acquired second language proficiency in Myaamia. Baldwin’s children learned Myaamia as their first language in the home—the first in a half-century to be first-language speakers of the language (Figure 5-50). As part of the revival of the Myaamia language, an online dictionary has been created, accessible at myaamiadictionary.org.

Based on the language skills of the Baldwin family, as well as other Miami people, Ethnologue has reclassified Myaamia from an extinct language to a reawakening language. Before reclassifying Myaamia, Ethnologue first undertook an in-depth study of the Baldwin family’s language skills by Dr. Wesley Leonard, a Native American language expert at the University of California, Riverside.

New Languages

While many languages are endangered, isolated languages continue to be identified and documented, and entirely new languages are found. Here are two recent examples:

A research team from Oregon’s Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages was in India to study rarely spoken languages. They heard people in the area speaking a language that was not listed in Ethnologue. The researchers concluded that what they were hearing was a distinct language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. The language, named “Koro Aka,” is now listed in Ethnologue as a language of northeastern India with 1,500 speakers.

A language called Warlpiri rampaku, or Light Warlpiri, was spoken by about one-half of the 700 residents of the village of Lajamanu in Australia’s Northern Territory. No one outside the village knew about the language until a University of Michigan researcher, Carmel O’Shannessy, heard it in 2013. Young people invented the new language. It started with parents speaking to their babies in a combination of three languages: Strong Warlpiri, English, and a Creole language that combines English and Strong Warlpiri. As they got older, the children combined the three languages into an entirely new one through actions such as inventing new verb endings and tenses.

Speakers of Bolinao, A Threatened Language, The Philippines Buying fish and seafood at the market.