ABSTRACT
Many lesser-used languages are spoken in the territory of more than one country, and have varying status in each of them. The status of some of them as languages is questioned – in some countries they are referred to as dialects, in some they are fully fledged languages.
Based on my experience as editor of the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing, which is currently being subsumed into the future UNESCO World Atlas of Languages, I aim to demonstrate and discuss some of the more contentious issues of language status at present.
The third edition of the UNESCO atlas, the first one to be online, became active in 2009 but ceased to be maintained in 2017 on the UNESCO website; it has not accepted interactive comments from users since that time. The volume, or website, that is planned to replace it will cover all the world’s languages, but endangered languages will be marked distinctively.
UNESCO has its own scale of endangerment. Those languages that are spoken across borders are only a minority of the endangered languages, so having a political border crossing a language area doesn’t necessarily imply endangerment. But in this chapter I pay particular attention to those languages, to see if they have any features in common. It should be possible to compare their status with that of diaspora languages, spoken outside the borders of their original home country.
These are some of the comparisons that can be made:
Legal status (official language or not).
Linguistic status (language/dialect).
Domains of use (broadcast, printed, electronic media, use in law, education, religion, the creative arts).
Orthographic differences.
Vernacular literacy compared with literacy in the national or regional language.
I aim to compare the situation of cross-border languages in all continents where transnational languages occur. Some cross-border languages might be spoken in a multilingual nation on one side, but a nation with one dominant language on the other. Some degree of multilingualism is almost always found, however.Does the geographical terrain of cross-border languages have features in common? Relatively inaccessible mountainous regions, for instance? Are the population movements across borders traceable in history? National borders are determined by several factors, and such natural boundaries as rivers are only one of them. In the partially ex-colonial continents of Africa and Latin America, indigenous languages are often bisected by boundaries.
