The users of endangered languages struggle to thrive in a digitally-mediated world. We have developed an automated method for assessing how well every language recognized by ISO 639 is faring in terms of digital language support. The assessment is based on scraping the names of supported languages from the websites of 143 digital tools selected to represent a full range of ways that digital technology can support languages. The method uses Mokken scale analysis to produce an explainable model for quantifying digital language support and monitoring it on a global scale.

Purpose This paper reports on the first 20 years of the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), comprehensive infrastructure for indexing and discovering language resources. Design/methodology/approach We begin with the original vision, assess progress relative to the original requirements, and identify ongoing challenges. Findings Based on the overview of OLAC history and recent developments and on the analysis of the situation in the language archives area as a whole, the authors propose an agenda for a more sustainable future for open language archiving. Originality/value This paper examines the progress of OLAC and discusses improvements in such areas as participation, access, and sustainability.

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) provides a comprehensive infrastructure that has allowed our community to index and discover language resources over the past 20 years. However, OLAC infrastructure has fallen behind as the digital libraries community has continued to evolve. New investment is required in order to move OLAC into the digital libraries mainstream. This paper reports on the first 20 years of OLAC and on an agenda leading to a more sustainable future for open language archiving.

This paper presents a visual depiction of the global spread of language loss over the past two centuries. This is done via a series of world maps (from 1795 to the present by 25-year intervals) in which each country is colored to represent the percentage of its indigenous languages that had died by that year or were doomed to die since they were no longer being used by children. A major finding is that the current rate of language loss is 9 per year, or one every 40 days—a far cry from the widely cited, “One language dies every 14 days.” Nevertheless, the rate of language loss is increasing and is on a trajectory to reach that level by the middle of the next century. An investigation of trends by world regions shows that the rate of language loss has already peaked in the Americas and Australia, remains relatively low in sub-Saharan Africa, and is accelerating sharply in the rest of the world.

Video recording of a panel session at the 2017 Symposium on Developing Infrastructure for Computational Resources on South Asian Languages. In this session, panelists discuss questions regarding harmonized annotation and data

/LINGTY.2007.021. Lewis, M. Paul; Gary F. Simons; and Charles D. Fennig (eds.) 2016. Ethnologue: Languages of the world. 19th edn. Dallas: SIL International. Online: http://www.ethnologue.com. Prince, Alan, and Paul Smolensky. 2004. Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Staroverov, Peter. 2014. Splitting theory and consonant epenthesis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University dissertation. Online: http://ling.rutgers.edu/docman-lister/adobe-pdf-documents/37-staroverov -thesis/file.

The Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS), developed by Lewis and Simons and based on work by Fishman, provides a means of rating ‘language vitality’ – the level of development or endangerment – where ‘development’ is understood as adding or preserving functions and ‘endangerment’ as loss of function. In its original form, it did not take sign languages into account. This paper explains what adjustments are needed to accommodate signed and spoken languages on an equal basis, recognising and generalising over the sociolinguistic differences in the two types of language communities. Besides minor wording changes made to avoid giving the impression that EGIDS applied only to spoken languages, we offer substantive changes to accommodate different patterns of intergenerational transmission; to better reflect the role of literacy, education, literature, institutional support, and standardisation in language development; and to reflect factors other than classic language shift which can undermine a language’s vitality. Clarifications are made to the role of interpreters in rating a language’s vitality, and in the definition of a language of wider communication. Several of these changes provide further insights into factors that affect the vitality of spoken languages.

Sociolinguists want to be able to share and compare datasets, and they want to do so now and far into the future. Achieving this dream will require that sociolinguistic corpora are archived in a sustainable way and that those corpora are encoded in such a way that interoperation among them is possible. This paper first sets the stage by describing broadly the requirements for sustainable archiving. It then focuses on the role of metadata in constructing an infrastructure that will support the kind of interoperation that is envisioned – both corpus-level metadata for facilitating the discovery of relevant corpora and observation-level metadata for facilitating the comparison of observations that are comparable.

“The world’s languages in crisis” (Krauss 1992), the great linguistic call to arms in the face of the looming language endangerment crisis, was first delivered in an Endangered Languages Symposium at the 1991 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Using the best available sources, he surveyed the global situation and estimated that only 10% of languages seem safe in the long term, up to 50% may already be moribund, and the remainder are in danger of becoming moribund by the end of this century. Twenty years later, better information is available. In this paper we use information from the latest edition of the Ethnologue (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013) to offer an update to the global statistics on language viability. Specifically the data for this study come from our work to estimate the level of every language on earth on the EGIDS or Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (Lewis & Simons 2010). Our finding is that at one extreme more than 75% of the languages that were in use in 1950 are now extinct or moribund in Australia, Canada, and the United States, but at the other extreme less than 10% of languages are extinct or moribund in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall we find that 19% of the world’s living languages are no longer being learned by children. We hypothesize that these radically different language endangerment outcomes in different parts of the world are explained by Mufwene’s (2002) observations concerning the effects of settlement colonization versus exploitation colonization on language ecologies. We also speculate that urbanization may have effects like settlement colonization and may thus pose the next great threat to minority languages.

“The world’s languages in crisis” (Krauss 1992), the great linguistic call to arms in the face of the looming language endangerment crisis, was first delivered in an Endangered Languages Symposium at the 1991 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Using the best available sources, he surveyed the global situation and estimated that only 10% of languages seem safe in the long term, up to 50% may already be moribund, and the remainder are in danger of becoming moribund by the end of this century. Twenty years later, better information is available. In this paper we use information from the latest edition of the Ethnologue (Lewis, Simons & Fennig 2013) to offer an update to the global statistics on language viability. Specifically the data for this study come from our work to estimate the level of every language on earth on the EGIDS or Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (Lewis & Simons 2010). Our finding is that at one extreme more than 75% of the languages that were in use in 1950 are now extinct or moribund in Australia, Canada, and the United States, but at the other extreme less than 10% of languages are extinct or moribund in sub-Saharan Africa. Overall we find that 19% of the world’s living languages are no longer being learned by children. We hypothesize that these radically different language endangerment outcomes in different parts of the world are explained by Mufwene’s (2002) observations concerning the effects of settlement colonization versus exploitation colonization on language ecologies. We also speculate that urbanization may have effects like settlement colonization and may thus pose the next great threat to minority languages.

Linguists have increased their documentation efforts in response to the sharp decline in the number of languages. Greater awareness and new sources of funding have led to an upsurge in language documentation. While individual languages make unique contributions to the world’s linguistic heritage, language families, by virtue of their shared heritage, have related contributions to make. The endangerment of entire families, while implied by the loss of language, has not been explored to date. Here, we examine estimates of how many linguistic stocks (the largest subgroups of related languages that are reconstructable) consist entirely of endangered languages and thus are endangered themselves. Our data set includes 372 stocks that had at least one living language in 1950. Our finding is that since that time, 15% of the world’s linguistic stocks have become extinct and another 27% are now moribund in that direct estimates of endangerment indicate that no member languages are being learned by children. For cases where direct estimates were not found, we used population as a proxy for endangerment. If, as many predict, a further 50% of the world’s languages become extinct or moribund in this century, then an additional 25% of the linguistic stocks would be at risk of being lost. If 90% share this fate, only 11% of stocks would have at least one presumably ‘safe’ language. A comparison of the vitality of linguistic stocks by world areas yields the following ranking from worst to best: Americas, Pacific, Asia, Africa, Europe. Finally, some aspects of language that are unique to disappearing language stocks are outlined. Renewed efforts at documenting members of such stocks seem justified.

Language resources are the bread and butter of language documentation and linguistic investigation. They include the primary objects of study such as texts and recordings, the outputs of research such as dictionaries and grammars, and the enabling technologies such as software tools and interchange standards. Increasingly, these resources are maintained in digital form and distributed via the web. However, searching on the web for language resources is a hit-and-miss affair. One problem is that many online resources are hidden behind interfaces to databases with the result that only a fraction of these resources are being indexed by search engines (He and others 2007). Even when resources are exposed to online search engines, they may not be discoverable since they are described in ad hoc ways that prevent searches from retrieving the desired results with high recall or precision.

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Fishman's 8-level Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) has served as the seminal and best-known evaluative framework of language endangerment for nearly two decades. It has provided the theoretical underpinnings for most practitioners of language revitalization. More recently, UNESCO has developed a 6-level scale of endangerment. Ethnologue uses yet another set of five categories to characterize language vitality. In this paper, these three evaluative systems are aligned to form an amplified and elaborated evaluative scale of 13 levels, the E(xpanded) GIDS. Any known language, including those languages for which there are no longer speakers, can be categorized by using the resulting scale (unlike the GIDS). A language can be evaluated in terms of the EGIDS by answering five key questions regarding the identity function, vehicularity, state of intergenerational language transmission, literacy acquisition status, and a societal profile of generational language use. With only minor modification the EGIDS can also be applied to languages which are being revitalized.

Seven years ago the senior leadership at SIL International (see Chart 1), a not-for-profit whose purpose is to facilitate language-based development among the peoples of the world, determined that it was time to build an integrated Enterprise Information System. There were three precipitating factors: mission critical IT systems were almost twenty years old and on the verge of obsolescence, their landscape was dotted with dozens of silo systems, and commitments to new strategic directions demanded significant business re-engineering.