Can a language with millions of speakers be endangered?

The dialogue on language endangerment worldwide has largely focused on languages with small speaker populations, in line with Krauss’s (1992) prediction that any language with a speaker population of less than 100,000 is at risk. The relationship between population size and language vitality is particularly relevant in the Indonesian context, where over 700 local languages have speaker populations that range from single digits to tens of millions of speakers. This paper considers the role of size in determining the fate of these local languages, against the backdrop of the highly successful development of Indonesian as a national language. Using Javanese as a case study, we show that even a language with over 80 million speakers can be at risk, a trend that has serious implications for all of the languages of Indonesia. Although a large population may signal a greater likelihood for official recognition and a more diverse speaker population that is less likely to simultaneously shift away from the L1, size alone cannot predict whether robust intergenerational transmission is occurring. Rather a clearer understanding of the demographic, sociolinguistic, and attitudinal factors that lead to individual and community decisions about intergenerational transmission are essential for assessing risk of endangerment

Methods for Modeling Social Factors in Language Shift

In this paper we expand our understanding of language endangerment by shifting the focus from small language communities to minority language communities with speaker populations in the millions. We argue for a methodological shift toward examining language shift scenarios more broadly and quantitatively for two main reasons: 1) it is becoming increasingly clear that a large speaker population does not protect against language shift (Anderbeck 2013); 2) we need to make a distinction between the symptoms and the causes of language shift, where factors such as a dwindling number of child speakers should be seen as symptoms of language shift that are caused by other factors (Himmelmann 2010). In this paper we use Indonesia as a case study and analyze a sample of the 2010 census. We treat language choice as a sociolinguistic variable and analyze the correlation between six social factors and language choice (local languages vs. the national language, Indonesian). These results provide a starting point for creating more comprehensive models of the sociolinguistics of language shift

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Shared Representations Underlie Metaphonological Judgments and Speech Motor Control

Researchers often use metalinguistic judgments to investigate phonological representations. The representations are assumed to govern speech motor control and thereby shape articulatory and acoustic characteristics of speech. Yet little is known about the relationship between metalinguistic judgments, phonological representations, and motor control. This paper reports on an experiment that directly investigates the relation between metalinguistic judgments and articulatory control, hypothesizing that the two share a common representation. This hypothesis predicts that differences in judgments should be correlated with differences in the acoustic characteristics of responses. An experiment was conducted in which syllable count judgments and productions of words with tense vowel/diphthong nuclei and liquid codas were obtained from native speakers of English. A subset of these words have previously been shown to exhibit ­variation in syllable count judgments. Acoustic analyses of productions showed that rime ­durations and formant trajectories differed between words associated with monosyllabic vs. disyllabic syllable count judgments. These results support the hypothesis that a common representation is utilized by the processes responsible for metaphonological judgments of syllable count and speech motor control