Which of the following is NOT the characteristic of a "language hotspot"? [br]

M: By some estimates, half of the world’s 7,000 languages will disappear in the next century. K. Linda Harrison, a linguist at Swarthmore College, has made a career documenting some of them and advocating for keeping them alive. Welcome to our talk, Ms. Harrison. So, what is a "language hotspot", and what are the characteristics of the typical hotspot?
W: "Language hotspot" is a term I coined in 2006, inspired by the biodiversity hotspots model. Languages are unevenly distributed around the globe, both geographically and demographically, and they face uneven threats. The hotspots model helps us to visualize and track this global trend, and to prioritize resources. (1) A language hotspot is a contiguous region which has, first of all, a very high level of language diversity. Secondly, it has high levels of language endangerment. Thirdly, it has relatively low levels of scientific documentation, like recordings, dictionaries, grammars, etc. We’ve identified two dozen hotspots to date, in places such as Oklahoma, Paraguay, India, Papua New Guinea and Siberia. With a scientific team from National Geographic, we are visiting the hotspots to take the pulse of some of the world’s most endangered languages. The hotspots model allows us to visualize the complex global distribution of language diversity, to focus research on areas of greatest urgency, and also to predict where we might encounter languages not yet known to science. This was recently borne out by our documentation of Koro, a small language in India that is new to science.
M: (2) What do we lose when we lose a language?
W: The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, worsened by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded. In "When Languages Die", I wrote "When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday" Only some cultures erect grandly built monuments by which we can remember their achievements. But all cultures encode their genius in their languages, stories, and lexicons. Each language is a unique expression of human creativity. We find millennia of careful observation of the natural world and human behavior, knowledge of flora and fauna, often not yet known or identified by scientists, and some of the secrets of how to live sustainably in challenging environments like the Arctic. (3) We would be outraged if Notre Dame Cathedral or the Great Pyramid of Giza were demolished to make way for modern buildings. We should be similarly appalled when languages — monuments to human genius far more ancient and complex than anything we have built with our hands — erode.
M: Talking about language and local ecology, you say losing one entails losing the other. If most things are translatable, is it possible to keep the knowledge but not the language?
W: It’s possible, but not likely, and it’s not the usual case we see everywhere from the Arctic to Amazonia. (4) In native cultures we observe the decline of languages and life ways occurring in parallel. There’s an astonishing book called Watching Ice and Weather Our Way. In it, the Yupik elders describe, define and draw sketches of 99 distinct types of sea ice formations which their language gives specific names to. Their climate science amazes us with its precision, predictive power, and depth of observation. Modern climate scientists have much to learn from it. As the Arctic ice melts, and new technologies like snowmobiles advance, Yupik ice-watching becomes the passion of the elderly few. Their knowledge of ice, their words for it, and the hunting skills and life ways are all receding together with the Yupik language itself.
M: Many of the peoples you describe are, from our point of view, desperately poor. "Development" tends to fold them into the bigger, and richer society, but kills their languages. How can the tradeoff be resolved?
W: No one, no matter how poor, becomes richer by abandoning one language to learn another, and in fact I suggest they become poorer from it. People of all ages, especially children, can easily be bilingual. New research shows that bilingualism strengthens the brain, by building up what psychologists call the cognitive reserve. In addition, heritage-language retention provides access to the cultural knowledge base and support a stronger ethnic identity and cultural pride. It is a pernicious and false message of globalization that language choice is subtractive, that is, you must abandon your heritage language to speak only a dominant tongue. Around the globe, we see minority speech communities, from Aymara to Zapotec, Aka to Mowhawk, pushing back against this ideology. (5) They are making a strategic decision to keep their languages, while becoming bilingual in a global tongue. We can all contribute to making the world safe for linguistic diversity. It requires a shift in attitudes. If we can learn to value the intellectual diversity that is fostered by linguistic variety, we can all help to ensure its survival. No one knows where the next brilliant idea will emerge; no culture has a monopoly on human genius.
M: All right. It’s so nice talking with you. Thanks a lot for sharing with us your insights into the human language.
W: My pleasure indeed.