5. Retell the text.

‘Killer languages’ strengthen their grip

Pessimists believe 90% of the currently extant tongues could disappear from the world map in the next 100 years.

Professor Janos Pusztay of the University of Szombathely in Hungary made a report on that at the 4th World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

Pusztay claimed that the number of speakers of Finno-Ugric and Uralic languages will halve by 2093, if not before then. The Hungarian scholar believes that the Ob-Ugrian mother-tongues of the indigenous Khanty and Mansi peoples, scattered across of the oil-rich regions of Western Siberia, along the Ob River and its tributaries, will be the first to go under. He predicts these languages will die out completely in the next few decades. In 50 to 100 years from now, perhaps only 10–20% of the languages now spoken will still be in existence. National indigenous minorities are being reduced to folklore curiosities, and national languages will in Pusztay’s view become increasingly “kitchen languages”, without any scope for communication in the realms of high culture or science.

Russia has been mentioned extensively here, for obvious reasons – it is the home for so many of the Finno-Ugric languages. However, the Russian language-map pales alongside a country like Papua New Guinea, which boasts more than 850 spoken languages. There are around 230 languages in Europe, but they represent only around 3% of the world’s total, while Africa can claim 30% and Asia 32%.

According to optimistic forecasts, roughly 50% of the world’s current languages will still be being spoken by 2100, while the most pessimistic prediction is that 90% of the world’s languages will be history by then.

The most toxic “killer language” is the one you are reading now: English, the language of new technology. For example, statistics of web pages record that more than 68% are in English.

Skutnabb-Kangas speaks of language murders in the same breath as language deaths. Her remedy against the impoverishment of the dots on the linguistic map is clear. Bilingual rights offer a lifeline to small languages if their position can be guaranteed alongside the mainstream language.

Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, a group comprising more than 20 languages spoken by over 20 million people in communities from Norway to Siberia and down as far as the Carpathians in the south. The largest members of the family are Finnish and Hungarian. Finnish is not an Indo-European language, and contrary to the popular expectation, it has few similarities with any of the Scandinavian languages, including the country’s second national language, Swedish.

A second misconception is that Hungarians and Finns understand one another fluently. The two languages are indisputably related, but that is as far as it goes. Even the far more closely-linked pairing of Finnish and Estonian presents problems to the untrained ear.