Does a language die every two weeks?
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 3 August 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
Researchers have catalogued 7,164 languages spoken around the world - some are used daily by billions. Half are spoken by less than 8000 people. The death of a language, when it’s no longer spoken as a first language by anyone living is a deeply significant moment in the cultural life of communities.
Multiple sources including the UN and National Geographic magazine have claimed this happens every two weeks. But we have reasons to be suspicious about that statistic. Gary Simons, executive editor of the Ethnologue language catalogue, explains where this idea came from.
Presenter: Kate Lamble Producer: Debbie Richford Series producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Nigel Appleton Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the Maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.0 | Hello and thank you for downloading the more or less podcast. |
| 0:38.0 | We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life and I'm Kate Lamble. |
| 0:43.0 | This is Boeses Senior from the indigenous Boe tribe of the Andaman Islands which are located in the Bay of Bengal. |
| 0:56.0 | She's singing in Akabow. |
| 0:58.0 | This is a language which no longer exists. |
| 1:01.0 | Boa Senia was its last. When she died in 2010, her language died with her. |
| 1:10.0 | Researchers have cataloged 7,164 languages spoken around the world. |
| 1:17.0 | Some are used by billions of people, but half of the world's languages are spoken by less |
| 1:22.2 | than 8,000. |
| 1:24.0 | Languages become extinct or dormant |
| 1:26.7 | when no living person still uses it as a first language, |
| 1:30.8 | a deeply significant moment in the cultural life of communities. |
| 1:35.0 | And today we're going to look at how often that happens, |
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