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2022 is the official start of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. The Initiative taken by the United Nations* aims to raise awareness of the importance of the languages and their vulnerable status.
What is an indigenous language? According to the Cambridge International Dictionary indigenous means naturally existing in a place or country and is a synonym for native. Factors such as terrain, social and historical events, and migrations of ancient peoples may have determined how many languages originated in a certain region. The first immediate association which I make related to indigenous is the languages of the natives spoken in Australia or Africa. In fact, it is said the continent with the most indigenous languages is Asia followed by Africa. Europe with less than 300 spoken languages holds the biggest number of active users. In comparison, thousands of languages are spoken on other continents, and some languages of the Pacific region, for instance, are known to have around 1000 speakers on average. Usually, those belong to small indigenous communities that are on the brink of extinction.
As someone who is born and lives in Europe, I wonder how come no languages seem to have originated on the continent and are thus of true European origin. In terms of Europe’s languages, my knowledge goes as far as Indo-European and some Uralic Finno-Ugric languages that are spoken around Europe. They seemingly have originated elsewhere and have traveled with migrants before settling here. The only language of Europe the origin of which it is known rather little about is Basque – an isolate** language of a mysterious origin that has presumably existed longest on European soil before the arrival of other languages considered today as European. Spoken by around half a million people that live in the north of Spain, the Basque language is one of a kind and does not resemble any other existing language. This is where my knowledge about Basque ends which only proves how little I know about the languages in the vicinity not to mention the vast number of those spoken around the world. Luckily, there is a decade dedicated to shedding light on the smaller indigenous communities and their languages to gain some knowledge about them and thus be part to help them in any way survive.
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*For more information and upcoming events https://en.unesco.org/idil2022-2032
**Isolate language – a language that has no relatives and is not assigned to any language family group
Sources: Ethnologue, UNESCO
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