Tongues on the EDGE: language preservation priorities based on threat and lexical distinctiveness.

ABSTRACT: Languages are being lost at rates exceeding the global loss of biodiversity. With the extinction of a language we lose irreplaceable dimensions of culture and the insight it provides on human history and the evolution of linguistic diversity. When setting conservation goals, biologists give higher priority to species likely to go extinct. Recent methods now integrate information on species evolutionary relationships to prioritize the conservation of those with a few close relatives. Advances in the construction of language trees allow us to use these methods to develop language preservation priorities that minimize loss of linguistic diversity. The evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered (EDGE) metric, used in conservation biology, accounts for a species' originality (evolutionary

SUBMITTER: Perrault N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5750020 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature