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Projected speaker numbers and dormancy risks of Canada's Indigenous languages
Uppsala University, Disciplinary Domain of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Languages, Department of Linguistics and Philology. Univ Montreal, Dept Demog & Populat Sci, Montreal, PQ, Canada..
Friedrich Schiller Univ, Dept English & Amer Studies, Jena, Germany..
Friedrich Schiller Univ, Dept English & Amer Studies, Jena, Germany..
Univ Auckland, Sch Biol Sci, Auckland, New Zealand.;Max Planck Inst Evolutionary Anthropol, Dept Linguist & Cultural Evolut, Leipzig, Germany..
2025 (English)In: Royal Society Open Science, E-ISSN 2054-5703, Vol. 12, no 2, article id 241091Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

UNESCO launched the International Decade of Indigenous Languages in 2022 to draw attention to the impending loss of nearly half of the world's linguistic diversity. However, how the speaker numbers and dormancy risks of these languages will evolve remains largely unexplored. Here, we use Canadian census data and probabilistic population projection to estimate changes in speaker numbers and dormancy risks of 27 Indigenous languages. Our model suggests that speaker numbers could, over the period 2001-2101, decline by more than 90% in 16 languages and that dormancy risks could surpass 50% among five. Since the declines are greater among already less commonly spoken languages, just nine languages could account for more than 99% of all Canadian Indigenous language speakers in 2101. Finally, dormancy risks tend to be higher among isolates and within specific language families, providing additional evidence about the uneven nature of language endangerment worldwide. Our approach further illustrates the magnitude of the crisis in linguistic diversity and suggests that demographic projection could be a useful tool in assessing the vitality of the world's languages.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Royal Society, 2025. Vol. 12, no 2, article id 241091
Keywords [en]
international decade of indigenous languages, linguistic diversity, population projection, census data, language endangerment, indigenous languages of Canada
National Category
Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics Natural Language Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-551752DOI: 10.1098/rsos.241091ISI: 001424627400001PubMedID: 39975661Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85218744559OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-551752DiVA, id: diva2:1946303
Funder
Wenner-Gren Foundations, UPD2022−0005German Research Foundation (DFG), 454798633Available from: 2025-03-20 Created: 2025-03-20 Last updated: 2025-03-20Bibliographically approved

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
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  • vancouver
  • Other style
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  • de-DE
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  • nn-NB
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More languages
Output format
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