According to UNESCO’s Endangered languages website, there are plans for a working paper entitled ‘Indigenous languages as tools for understanding and preserving biodiversity’.
The sub-theme “maintaining indigenous languages, conserving biodiversity” is based on deeply ingrained positive feedback system (vicious cycle) in which the loss of biodiversity, often through large-scale environmental destruction, results in the loss of cultural heritage and traditional knowledge, including but not limited to that embedded in endangered languages, which then results in further loss of biodiversity.
Conversely, there is also, in theory, a fruitful symbiotic relationship between environment and language, where the diversity of one encourages the diversity of the other.
LINKING BIODIVERSITY AND LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
Most sources recognize that the fundamental linkage between biodiversity and linguistic diversity lies in the preservation and documentation of indigenous classification systems, which often exist in the form of local names, folk taxonomies, and oral traditions.
But, aside from being the pieces of another interesting example of how humans and the environment are interconnected, why are biodiversity and linguistic diversity, as separate issues, even important at all?
BIODIVERSITY
Biodiversity (short for biological diversity) emerged as an international political topic in the 1980s, although there is probably literature from long before that. In 1988, American biologist and Pulitzer Prize winner E.O. Wilson edited and partially wrote Biodiversity, an important work treating what was then identified as “the most urgent global problem: the rapidly accelerating loss of plant and animal species to increasing human population pressure and the demands of economic development.”
Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter entitled “The Current State of Biological Diversity” written by E.O. Wilson:
“Biological diversity must be treated more seriously as a global resource, to be indexed, used, and above all, preserved. Three circumstances conspire to give this matter an unprecedented urgency. First, exploding human populations are degrading the environment at an accelerating rate, especially in tropical countries. Second, science is discovering new uses for biological diversity in ways that can relieve both human suffering and environmental destruction. Third, much of the diversity is being irreversibly lost through extinction caused by the destruction of natural habitats, again especially in the tropics. Overall, we are locked into a race. We must hurry to acquire the knowledge on which a wise policy of conservation and development can be based for centuries to come.”
Around the same time, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) began exploring the need for an international legal treat, and by 1991, in one of the early UNEP negotiating sessions for a Convention on Biological Diversity held in Nairobi, the convention already declared its objective
“…to conserve the maximum possible biological diversity for the benefit of present and future generations and for its intrinsic value, [and to provide for the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits of research in biotechnology arising out of conservation of the biological diversity. This is to be achieved] by ensuring that the use of biological resources is sustainable; [by providing adequate, new and additional funding to the developing countries) [by taking account of the need to share costs and benefits between developed and developing countries,) and by [securing] [providing] economic and legal conditions favourable for the transfer of technology [to them on preferential and non commercial terms) necessary to accomplish this objective.]“
(from the Second Revised Draft Convention on Biological Diversity)
Today, on the UNEP Convention on Biological Diversity website, you can read the history of the convention as well as the the text of convention itself (in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) which was opened for signature in June 1992 at the Rio “Earth Summit” and entered into force on 29 December 1993. The three objectives of the current CBD are: 1) conservation of biodiversity, 2) sustainable use of biodiversity, and 3) fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.
After the first International Year of Biodiversity in 2010, the UN General Assembly declared 2011-2010 the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity and has adopted five collective strategic “Aichi Targets”: A) address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss by mainstreaming biodiversity across government and society, B) reduce the direct pressures on biodiversity and promote sustainable use, C) improve the status of biodiversity by safeguarding ecosystems, species and genetic diversity, D) enhance the benefits to all from biodiversity and ecosystem services, and E) enhance implementation through participatory planning, knowledge management and capacity building.
Furthermore, the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre specifies three levels of biological diversity:
1. Genetic
Genetic diversity refers to the heritable variations in the sequence of the four base-pairs which constitute the genetic code.
2. Species
Species diversity, or species “richness”, is usually what people mean when they say “biodiversity”, and this would refer to the number of species in different taxonomic groups. About 1.8 million species have been described to date, but it is estimated that between 5 and 100 million species exist on earth at present (most are probably insects and microorganisms).
Regarding plants, in particular, the Botanical Gardens Conservation International estimates that the number of plant species currently in existence is probably around 400,000, although accurate calculations are complicated by various factors, including even the different names used for plants in different areas. Moreover, more than 13,000 plant species have been identified by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, where over 9,000 species are listed as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered.
3. Ecosystem
The quantitative assessment of diversity at the ecosystem, habitat or community level remains problematic. Currently there is no unique definition and classification of ecosystems at the global level, and it is thus difficult in practice to assess ecosystem diversity other than on a local or regional basis and then only largely in terms of vegetation.
LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY
Language diversity is also a relatively recent political topic focused on protecting languages as living representations of cultural heritage, including traditional knowledge and other intangible and unwritten sources of environmental understanding. UNESCO, in its Action Plan of its 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, set objectives for:
- safeguarding the linguistic heritage of humanity and giving support to expression, creation and dissemination in the greatest possible number of languages;
- encouraging linguistic diversity – while respecting the mother tongue – at all levels of education, wherever possible, and fostering the learning of several languages from the earliest age; and
- promoting linguistic diversity in cyberspace and encouraging universal access through the global network to all information in the public domain.
But why we should we care about the heritage of a language, much less that of many diverse human languages? UNESCO’s Endangered Languages Programme explains that
“every language reflects a unique world-view with its own value systems, philosophy and particular cultural features. The extinction of a language results in the irrecoverable loss of unique cultural knowledge embodied in it for centuries, including historical, spiritual and ecological knowledge that may be essential for the survival of not only its speakers, but also countless others.”
Is the loss of linguistic diversity a rampant problem? Exact numbers of languages are probably impossible to measure (due to the lack of definitions of things like dialects vs. languages, living vs. dead, etc). Nevertheless, various sources, including UNESCO and SIL’s Ethnologue, indicate that there over 6,000 living human languages in the world, and that over 2,000 of these are either vulnerable or endangered.
On this interactive UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, you can search for endangered languages by area, name, number of speakers, and vitality. Below I have copied the six degrees of vitality/endangerment based on various factors, most importantly intergenerational transmission, with the current numbers of languages in bold.
| Degree of endangerment |
Intergenerational Language Transmission |
|
safe |
language is spoken by all generations; intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted
>> not included in the Atlas |
 |
vulnerable |
most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home) ~ 601 |
 |
definitely endangered |
children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home ~648 |
 |
severely endangered |
language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves ~ 526 |
 |
critically endangered |
the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently ~576 |
 |
extinct |
there are no speakers left ~231
>> included in the Atlas if presumably extinct since the 1950s |
