Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

that the General Assembly can actually attempt to
solve. Complex economic and financial issues are
beyond the control of such an organization, and two
sovereign nations in conflict are unlikely to come to
peace because of a General Assembly reprimand.
Social, humanitarian and cultural issues, however,
require the unification of interests that cross borders
and the implementation of solutions by all the nations
of the world. it is with this optimism that the Social,
Humanitarian and Cultural Committee tackles two
pressing problems: the fate of endangered languages
and the impoverishment of indigenous populations.
Topic Area A
Statement of the Problem
At first, the fate of endangered languages may
appear to be a less pressing and critical issue than
many of the others that the united Nations faces
today. With the threat of a nuclear war hanging over
the daily negotiations of the world’s leaders and
countless families living in destitution, why would
the United Nations take the time to discuss an issue
of such seemingly little importance? upon further
analysis, however, language endangerment is about
more than just the future of linguistic diversity. The
problem of language endangerment is intrinsically
connected to debates over intangible cultural
heritage, individual and communal identity, economic
opportunity, and minority rights, which are all subjects
deemed important by the international community. It
is with these broader issues in mind that we consider
the fate of endangered languages as a question for
the international community to solve.
Having begun on an international scale only twenty
years ago, the study of endangered languages is so
young that there is no agreement on the terminology
to be used when discussing this topic. The simplest
distinctions divide languages into three categories:
safe or viable, those with a healthy number of
speakers and a high likelihood of maintaining this level
in the next century; endangered, those with a smaller
number of speakers and a significant chance of losing
all of their speakers in the next century; and extinct,
those with no remaining speakers. An additional
term that is often employed in the literature of the
topic is moribund, which refers to languages that
still have older speakers but are no longer learned as
the mother tongue by children. Some linguists and
anthropologists divide the category of endangered
languages into subcategories based on how extreme
the risk of extinction is, ranging from languages that
still have robust numbers of speakers to those with
only a few elderly speakers remaining. 8
While the number of speakers is the most obvious
signal of the status of a specific language, there is no
set definition of how few speakers a language must
have in order to be considered endangered. The same
number of speakers may correlate to a safe language
in one location and an endangered language in
another. in most places, for example, a language
with five hundred speakers would be on the verge
of extinction; on the Pacific islands, however, there
are a number of languages that are thriving with five
hundred speakers. 9 thus, the percentage of the local
population that speaks the language in question is
an important factor for determining endangerment.
this example shows that the percentage of the local
population that speaks the language is an important
factor. If the speakers make up a small part of the
population, the language is likely in decline, but
a language that makes up the majority of a small
community may be secure. 10 Conversely, a large
number of speakers does not make a language
immune from endangerment, especially if there are
political factors working against the language, like
the institution of a dominant official language or
languages. Lombard, a language spoken in the north
of Italy, for example, has over three million speakers
10
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