ABSTRACT
During the past decade, many linguists have expressed their concern about the future of the world’s languages. Many prognoses were given. Among the most striking was the one made in the early 1990s by a researcher of endangered languages, Michael Krauss (1992). According to Krauss only about 10% of the world’s languages could be regarded as secure survivors (1992:7). The estimate is based on the supposition that a language has lost its continuity when the younger generation of the language community no longer speaks it as their mother tongue. The other languages – the secure survivors – have a position as an official language, or enjoy a large number of speakers, which guarantees them a rather safe position in the linguistic struggle for survival. Furthermore, alarm has also been sounded about some languages previously regarded as “safe”. Recently, a Swedish researcher of bilingualism, Kenneth Hyltenstam, expressed his concern about the situation of Swedish within the growing European Union. Swedish seems increasingly likely to lose domains to English as internationalisation affects education, economic life and the entertainment industry in Sweden (Hyltenstam, 1999: 212-216; Teleman and Westman, 1997). Most of the world’s languages, however, seem to face much greater hazards (see Wurm, 1999, for a categorisation of stages for endangerment).
