第1自然段

In the Native American Navajo nation, which sprawls across four states in the American south-west, the native language is dying. Most of its speakers are middle-aged or elderly. Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in English. Street signs, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are all in English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time.

在美国南部的纳瓦霍族土著居民领土上，母语纳瓦霍语正逐渐消失。说纳瓦霍语的大多数人是中年或老年人。尽管许多学生都会上纳瓦霍语的课，但学校主要以英语为主。街道标志、超市商品甚至他们自己的报纸都是用英语写的。因此，语言学家们对于在未来一百年内还有没有纳瓦霍语的母语使用者表示怀疑。

第2自然段

Navajo is far from alone. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within two generations – that’s one language lost every ten days. Never before has the planet’s linguistic diversity shrunk at such a pace. At the moment, we are heading for about three or four languages dominating the world,’ says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. ‘It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the loss is difficult to know.’

纳瓦霍语并非孤例。全球6800种语言中，有一半可能在两代人内消失，也就是平均每十天就会有一种语言灭亡。从未有过任何时期地球上的语言多样性以如此快的速度萎缩。英国雷丁大学的进化生物学家马克·帕格尔表示：“目前我们正朝着全球只有三四种语言主宰的方向发展。这是一场大规模的物种灭绝，我们是否能从这种损失中恢复过来很难说。”

第3自然段

Isolation breeds linguistic diversity: as a result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people. Only 250 languages have more than a million speakers, and at least 3,000have fewer than 2,500. It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000speakers. What makes a language endangered is not just the number of speakers, but how old they are. If it is spoken by children it is relatively safe. The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language Center, in Fairbanks.

隔离造就了语言多样性，结果世界上充斥着只有少数人使用的语言。只有250种语言拥有超过一百万使用者，至少有3000种语言的使用者不到2500人。关键并非这些小型语言即将消失。纳瓦霍语被认为是濒危语言，尽管拥有15万使用者。一个语言是否濒危并不仅仅取决于使用者数量，而更关系到使用者的年龄。如果有孩子们会说这种语言，那么它相对来说是相对安全的。据阿拉斯加原住民语言中心主任迈克尔·克劳斯所说，那些只有老年人会说的语言属于危险濒危语言。

第4自然段

Why do people reject the language of their parents? It begins with a crisis of confidence, when a small community finds itself alongside a larger, wealthier society, says Nicholas Ostler, of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath. ‘People lose faith in their culture,’ he says. ‘When the next generation reaches their teens, they might not want to be induced into the old traditions.’

为什么人们会拒绝使用自己父母的语言？这一切始于信心的危机，当一个小社区发现自己与一个更大、更富有的社会并存时，人们就会失去对自己文化的信心，英国濒危语言基金会的尼古拉斯·奥斯特勒如此指出。“人们失去了对自己文化的信念，”他说。“当下一代人进入青少年时期，他们可能不愿接纳旧传统。”

第5自然段

The change is not always voluntary Quite often, governments try to kill off a minority language by banning its use in public or discouraging its use in schools, all to promote national unity The former US policy of running Indian reservation schools in English, for example, effectively put languages such as Navajo on the danger list. But Salikoko Mufwene, who chairs the Linguistics Department at the University of Chicago, argues that the deadliest weapon is not government policy but economic globalisation. ‘Native Americans have not lost pride in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-economic pressures,’ he says. ‘They cannot refuse to speak English if most commercial activity is in English.’ But are languages worth saving? At the very least, there is a loss of data for the study of languages and their evolution, which relies on comparisons between languages, both living and dead. When an unwritten and unrecorded language disappears, it is lost to science.

这种变化并不总是自愿的。政府经常试图通过禁止在公共场所使用某种少数民族语言或者鼓励在学校使用主流语言来扼杀少数民族语言，以促进国家的统一。例如，以前美国对印第安保留地学校采用英语教学的政策实际上使纳瓦霍语等语言走向濒危。但芝加哥大学语言学系主任萨利科科·穆夫韦纳认为，最致命的武器并非政府政策，而是经济全球化。“美洲原住民并没有失去对自己语言的自豪感，但他们不得不适应社会经济的压力，”他说。“如果商业活动大部分都是用英语进行的，他们无法拒绝说英语。”但人们是否有必要拯救语言？至少，这会导致语言研究和语言演变的数据丧失，这些研究依赖于对比不同语言，无论是现存的还是已经灭亡的。当一个未被书写和记录的语言消失时，它将永久失去。

第6自然段

Language is also intimately bound up with culture, so it may be difficult to preserve one without the other. ‘If a person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something,’ Mufwene says. ‘Moreover, the loss of diversity may also deprive us of different ways of looking at the world,’ says Pagel. There is mounting evidence that learning a language produces physiological changes in the brain. ‘Your brain and mine are different from the brain of someone who speaks French, for instance,’ Pagel says, and this could affect our thoughts and perceptions. ‘The patterns and connections we make among various concepts may be structured by the linguistic habits of our community.’

语言与文化密切相关，因此很难在没有文化的情况下保护语言。“如果一个人从纳瓦霍语转向英语，他们会失去一些东西，”穆夫韦纳说。“此外，多样性的丧失也可能剥夺我们对世界的不同看法，”帕格尔说。越来越多的证据表明学习一门语言会在大脑中产生生理变化。“你和我与说法语的人的大脑是不同的，”帕格尔说，这可能会影响我们的思维和感知。“我们在不同概念之间建立的模式和联系可能由我们社区的语言习惯所塑造。”

第7自然段

So despite linguists’ best efforts, many languages will disappear over the next century. But a growing interest in cultural identity may prevent the direst predictions from coming true. ‘The key to fostering diversity is for people to learn their ancestral tongue, as well as the dominant language,’ says Doug Whalen, founder and president of the Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut. ‘Most of these languages will not survive without a large degree of bilingualism,’ he says. In New Zealand, classes for children have slowed the erosion of Maori and rekindled interest in the language. A similar approach in Hawaii has produced about 8,000new speakers of Polynesian languages in the past few years. In California, ‘apprentice’ programmes have provided life support to several indigenous languages. Volunteer ‘apprentices’ pair up with one of the last living speakers of a Native American tongue to learn a traditional skill such as basket weaving, with instruction exclusively in the endangered language. After about 300 hours of training they are generally sufficiently fluent to transmit the language to the next generation. But Mufwene says that preventing a language from dying out is not the same as giving it new life by using it every day. ‘Preserving a language is more like preserving fruits in ajar,’ he says.

尽管语言学家们做出了最大的努力，但在未来一个世纪内，许多语言仍将消失。然而，对文化认同的兴趣日益增长可能会阻止最糟糕的预测成为现实。“促进多样性的关键是人们学习他们祖先的语言，以及主流语言，”康涅狄格州纽黑文市濒危语言基金创始人兼总裁道格·瓦伦表示。“没有大量的双语使用，大多数语言都无法幸存下来，”他说。在新西兰，为儿童开设的课程减缓了毛利语的消亡，并重新激发了对该语言的兴趣。在夏威夷进行了类似的尝试，过去几年中产生了大约8000名波利尼西亚语言的新使用者。在加利福尼亚州，“徒弟”计划为数种土著语言提供了生命支持。志愿者“徒弟”与一位最后一位会说某种美洲土著语言的老人配对，学习传统技能，如编篮子，全部使用濒危语言进行指导。经过约300小时的培训，他们通常可以流利地将这种语言传授给下一代。但穆夫韦纳表示，阻止一种语言消亡并不等同于通过日常使用为其注入新生命。“保护一种语言更像是保存果脯一样，”他说。

第8自然段

However, preservation can bring a language back from the dead. There are examples of languages that have survived in written form and then been revived by later generations. But a written form is essential for this, so the mere possibility of revival has led many speakers of endangered languages to develop systems of writing where none existed before.