The United Nations culture agency has declared that two variations of the Greenlandic language are facing potential extinction.
Sermitsiaq reports that UNESCO, the UN organisation for culture, has predicted that ten percent of the languages used around the globe will disappear over the next one hundred years, including North and East Greenlandic.
The declaration comes in the publication of the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, which also warns that West Greenlandic is considered ‘vulnerable’. East and North Greenlandic are deemed to be ‘definitely endangered’.
Peter Bakker, a Danish language expert, says the mapping of the health of the languages of the world and their long-term survival prospects was a smart move. In all, some 2,400 languages are considered endangered by UNESCO. “Dead languages give social problems,” said Bakker. “People who lose a language lose an understanding of their social status and live their lives without a part of their identity.”
In releasing the new world atlas, UNESCO hopes to educate younger generations into the importance of maintaining traditional languages, with ethnic groups benefiting from a greater background of their origin. UNESCO has also expressed hopes that the website which showcases the language atlas will also serve as a fundraising tool for the ongoing documentation of global culture and assist museums to promote languages that are in danger.
One of the biggest threats to the Greenlandic language would, ironically, be getting rid of Danish as the second language of Greenland and replacing it solely with English.
If people are trilingual then the indigenous smaller language (Greenlandic) seems a reasonable and normal language – it’s one of a number of languages they speak.
However,were Danish to be dropped then English would become so all pervasive that it would question the whole reasoning and inner confidence of the Greenlandic speaking community.
Danish it seems has ceased to be a threat to Greenlandic since about the mid-1980s but moving from an effective trilingual to bilingual country would see Greenlandic in a similar situation to her cousins in Nunavut and other first nation’s languages.
I write as a Welsh-speaker and know what happens when you’re next to the world’s strongest ever language!
Don’t drop Danish!
NO KIDDING that it’s an endangered language! It doesn’t deserve to survive. I am almost never this crass but, after doing a little surfing on this subject, I am astonished at what I saw. Greenland is sabotaging its chance to be a relevant new nation by making Kalaallisut its official language!
I just went to the knr.gl website. It looks cluttered and full of gibberish because the Kalaallisut language is a cluttered mess to start with! I did a scan of Kalaallisut on Wikipedia and all I see is a language that is useless for anything above tribal or subsistence levels of existence. I seriously doubt that the excruciating academic analysis of the language could even be translated into Kalaallisut!
Don’t even try to convince me that Kalaallisut is suitable as the official language of a modern state! I don’t see much call for Kalaallisut translators! Denmark is very respectable in the world and to make the Danish language take a back seat in a land with so much promise is stupid!
The only reason I can think of why Denmark went along with this is their paralyzing obsession with racial self-flagellation and political correctness.
Jim, your post is blatant racism and is with no factual basis. Even if Greenlandic can’t express educated concepts, all it needs is development (i.e., new coinages or loanwords). There was a time when English’s ancestor wouldn’t have been able to express those concepts either.
You think the knr.gl is full of gibberish? Well, of course it seems that way! You don’t speak Greenlandic, so why would you understand it? Do you honestly think Greenlandic-speakers shouldn’t have their own websites?
Finally, the reason Greenland is not a “relevant nation” in your words (a “major power” would be more appropriate) is because of its (relatively) small population. It has nothing to do with its official language. Your making correlation without causation.
Why is it even relevant to you? If the Inuit of Greenland want to preserve their language, by all means they should. They shouldn’t have to answer to raving imperialists like Jim.