Language: Safe, endangered or extinct

My first language was Latvian, an obscure language spoken in an even more obscure country. It has the distinction of being one of the oldest languages in the Indo-European family of languages, primarily because those ancient Latvians who lived on the Baltic Sea didn't move around much.

This is why isolated, "backward" geographic areas often have the most pristine (meaning unadulterated or "contaminated") languages. For instance, there is a pocket in Appalachia where the people speak an English that is closer to what was spoken 200 years ago in Britain than the American English we speak today.

Latvians who sought refuge in the U.S. after World War II worried and fretted from day one that in learning to speak English, which they definitely wanted to do, their children might "forget" or never learn to speak, read, or write Latvian. They were smart to worry. According to linguists who study and document the world's lesser-known languages, a language is "safe" if 100 years from now children will be speaking that language. If children are not speaking that language 100 years from now, the language is classified as "endangered."

In determining whether a language is endangered or not, the number of speakers is less important than the ages of the speakers. For instance, the Basque language is endangered despite the fact that there are 890,000 Basque speakers in Spain and 80,000 Basque speakers in France. The problem is that the Basque children in Spain are becoming more fluent in Spanish than in Basque, and in France very few children learn it at all. Even more telling is the fact that the 80,000 who speak Basque in France are "elderly," so chances of children speaking Basque in France 100 years from now are slim.

There are 1.4 million Latvian speakers in Latvia and 150,000 Latvians in "exile." In Latvia, although Latvian is the official language, to get a job in any government or state agency, one must speak Russian. The mayor of Riga, the capital, is also Russian. Latvians fear the Russian language as if it were a tsunami. In the U.S. and Canada there are still Latvian summer "schools" and summer camps for children, and Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo offers Latvian, but the old Latvians are dying and the young will have fewer and fewer opportunities to learn the language.

Latvian is not on the endangered list, though. My son Sev understands Latvian, but he doesn't speak it much anymore; his daughter Savannah (almost two years old) speaks some (and I hope, more), but 100 years from now? Who knows.

• Ursula Carlson, Ph.D., teaches writing and literature at Western Nevada College. She points out there are approximately 6,000 languages spoken today; an average of 30 per year will have reached the brink of extinction by 2100.