COLUMN ONE : Languages on Brink of Extinction : One linguist says half the world’s 6,000 languages are dying--just as the Umutina tribal language perished with a single aged Brazilian woman in 1988.

When Kuzakaru, a toothless, aged woman who liked to babble with children, died in 1988 on an Indian reservation along the Paraguay River in western Brazil, the Umutina language died with her--and so did the hopes of her people and linguists the world over.

In a hunt to save the language, government linguist Nelmo Scher had found Kuzakaru only a year before on the reservation in Mato Grosso state.

Kuzakaru, in her 70s, was the last Umutina Indian who could still speak the Umutina language. She did not use it often. Since the other 160 Umutinas on the reservation spoke no Umutina, she conversed with them in Portuguese. She spoke Umutina only when children sat near her. They did not understand the words with their explosive consonants but liked to listen.

The Umutinas wanted Scher to take copious notes from Kuzakaru so he could preserve the language and enable teachers to impart it to pupils in the reservation school.

But Scher knew it would take six months of painstaking work for him to collect enough data to preserve the language in writing. Kuzakaru’s lack of teeth complicated the job, since she could not pronounce sounds distinctly. Scher’s work at the government’s National Indian Foundation simply did not leave him enough time.

When he finally broke free from government duties a year later, he was too late. Kuzakaru had died of cancer.

“It’s sad, isn’t it?” said Scher. “For me, the date of the death of that language is the date of the death of that lady. . . . I never thought she would die so soon. I feel guilty.”

The death of a language is no rare event these days. Michael Krauss, a University of Alaska linguist, estimates that half the world’s 6,000 languages are now moribund because they are no longer learned by children. At a 1991 symposium, he predicted that they will all die out during the next century.

That does not mean the rest are safe. Krauss insisted that many other languages are endangered--children learn these languages now but, for one reason or other, they will probably stop learning them in the next century.

“I consider it a plausible calculation that--at the rate things are going--the coming century will see either the death or the doom of 90% of mankind’s languages,” he said.

He classified only 600 as safe. Most are regarded as safe because at least 100,000 people use them. But numbers do not always guarantee health. Although Breton in France encompassed 1 million speakers earlier this century and Navajo more than 100,000, both languages are now near extinction.

What does the loss of a language mean? “We lose something of what it means to be human--all the vast variety of ways of expressing the same ideas, the creativity,” said anthropologist Frances Popovich. Having one language, she went on, would be “just like sticking with the rose . . . and not knowing about all the other flowers.”

Ireland is still struggling to preserve Gaelic. Basque leaders are desperate about the plight of their language. Only the stubbornness of old-fashioned religious sects keeps Yiddish and Pennsylvania Dutch alive.

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Heavyset men in black berets still gather without women in the bars and cafes of the valleys in the Pyrenees and gossip in Euskera, the Basque language that may have been Spain’s original language before Roman conquerors came with their Latin. When a stranger enters, ordering a drink in Spanish, Basques stop their talk and stare with suspicion.

In the idyllic valleys of the Spanish Basque country, where smooth green hills flecked with sheep lead down to stone villages and medieval churches, Euskera has power and vitality. Yet it is an endangered language.

Most Spanish Basques do not live in idyllic valleys but in industrial towns. And Spanish, not Euskera, reigns in the towns.

Since democracy took hold in Spain after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975, the Basque country has won a good deal of autonomy, and its leaders have embarked on a campaign to reverse the decline of Euskera and entrench it in Basque life. The struggle is difficult and frustrating, and the Basque leaders may fail.

But some linguists and many Basque politicians are optimistic. “If any endangered language has a hope of surviving,” said Linda White, who teaches Euskera in the University of Nevada’s Basque Studies Program, “then the Basque language should fall into that category.”

According to the latest census figures from the autonomous Basque regional government, only 25% of the 2.2 million people who live in the three small Basque provinces of Spain speak and use Euskera in the course of daily life.

Another 17% say they have a knowledge of the Basque language but normally do not use it. The rest--58% of the population--cannot understand Euskera.

Use of the language has declined for almost 100 years. In the late 19th Century, the Basque region burst forth as one of the country’s industrial centers, attracting workers from Andalusia and other regions of Spain. Most newcomers did not bother to learn the difficult regional language. There was no incentive to do so. Rich, educated Basques spoke only Spanish, sneering at Euskera as a peasant’s language.

To make matters worse, Sabino Arana, the xenophobic champion of Basque nationalism a century ago, preached that Basques must not sully their language by teaching it to outsiders. This made it virtually impossible for outsiders to embrace Basque culture and language.

Basque nationalists tend to blame the weak hold of their language on repression by the Franco dictatorship, which banned public use of Euskera and other regional languages.

But Julio Caro Baroja, the Basque anthropologist, refuses to put all blame on Franco. Caro Baroja points out that the Franco repression failed to weaken the Catalan language in the Catalonia region of Spain. More than 90% of those who live in Catalonia, whether rich or poor, educated or not, Catalan or Andalusian by descent, understand Catalan; 64% speak it.

Basque nationalism is now powering a drive to instill Euskera throughout Basque country. Instead of refusing to teach Basque to newcomers as they once did, some nationalists are now trying to impose it on them, whether they like it or not.

Yet there is a lingering racism that sometimes stands in the way.

“If you think like Arana and those who still follow him--that the Basque is tall, noble and generous while the Andalusian is short, lascivious, sneaky and evil,” said Spanish-speaking Caro Baroja in a Spanish magazine interview, “then let’s put out the light and go home, because you are an authentic idiot.”

Learning Euskera has become fashionable. Although they have few opportunities to use it every day, Basque adults in Bilbao sign up for evening classes. A new publishing house--heavily subsidized by universities, foundations and government savings banks--is publishing 100 classics in Euskera.

The fierceness of the new allegiance to the Basque language provokes resentment among non-Basques. In the 1990 regional elections, a third of the voters in the Basque country voted for parties that want to slow down the imposition of Euskera.

But this has not deterred the Basque government. It funds Euskera schools, develops adult Basque-language courses, favors Basque speakers for government jobs, subsidizes Basque books, magazines and movies; its government also operates a Basque-language television channel.

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It is not easy for outsiders to enter the homes and farms of the Amish. Veterinarians, however, do have access. Many Amish farms are dairies with cows in need of tending. And the Amish go everywhere by horse and buggy. They need veterinarians the way Angelenos need car mechanics.

“When we show up at a farm,” said a vet who has worked among the Amish in Indiana, “we usually find a bunch of little kids at the fence who don’t speak any English. So we use the only words we know, asking them hutchley (for foal) or humley (for calf). If we ask about anything else in English, they don’t have a clue what we’re saying. . . .

“Inside the barn, the adults and the older children speak to us in English,” he added. “It’s English in a singsong Pennsylvania Dutch accent. They all learn English in their eight years in elementary school. But everything they do among themselves they do in Pennsylvania Dutch.”

Despite incessant American pressures of acculturation, the Amish, who do not have television or telephones, have held on to their language in the United States for centuries. But their steadfastness reflects the triumph not of a language but of its last remnants.

Most Americans do not realize it, but the second language in the United States was once a form of German known as Pennsylvania Dutch or Pennsylvania German. At independence in 1776, half the population of Pennsylvania spoke German.

But Robert C. Williamson of Lehigh University, a specialist in the struggles of language survival, describes Pennsylvania Dutch now as “a relic language . . . rapidly becoming a classic instance of language death.”

In a recent scholarly study, he estimates that 100,000 Americans still speak Pennsylvania Dutch, most of them members of the Amish and Mennonite sects. The Amish and Mennonites have taken the language with them to their colonies in Ohio, Indiana and Canada as well.

The most orthodox of the Amish and Mennonites conduct church services in a formal German and use Pennsylvania Dutch at home. English, the language of most of their schoolrooms, is used when the Amish and Mennonites communicate with outsiders at the market and elsewhere.

Williamson classifies Pennsylvania Dutch as a language “in the same life-and-death struggle” as Gaelic and Yiddish, but he has concluded that Pennsylvania Dutch has even less of a chance than the others to survive. Yet, “in the tempo of American culture,” he said, “it is remarkable that Pennsylvania German has remained vital for nearly three centuries.”

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Euskera and Pennsylvania Dutch may be endangered, but they seem healthy alongside the indigenous languages of Brazil. No country in the Western Hemisphere speaks more languages than Brazil. Linguists count 180.

But that is only a fraction of the number once in use in Brazil. Aryon Rodrigues, Brazil’s leading specialist on native languages, estimates that 1,200 languages were spoken by tribes of Brazil in the early 1500s, when Portuguese conquerors came.

Slavery, slaughter and European disease wiped out millions of Indians and their languages. Then, as Indians lost their land and moved to towns, as their culture succumbed to European ways, their languages atrophied and died. Even today, it is hard to persuade Indians of the need to salvage their languages.

“An aversion to ethnic and linguistic diversity continues to be one of the strongest legacies that Brazilian society received from the Portuguese colonizers,” said Rodrigues, 67.

Statistics etch the story: 156 Brazilian Indian languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people each, 40 by fewer than 100 each.

Macu, a native language in the Amazonian state of Roraima, is spoken by only one Indian, a man in his 60s. Bare, a language of the Rio Negro, an Amazon tributary, is spoken by only one Indian. Linguists are working to document grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation before these Indians die with their languages as Kuzakaru died in 1988 with Umutina.

In Brazil’s Northeast Region, only one native language remains--Yate, an unusual tonal language with many words that start with difficult consonant combinations like tk , tsf and tshl. Rodrigues calls Yate the Basque language of Brazil because it is an isolated language similar to no other.

Study of a language like Yate--before it dies--can yield secrets to linguists about all languages’ structure. “The languages here have unique properties that are not found in other parts of the world,” Rodrigues said.

Does the death of a language matter? It may not always seem so. When the last speakers of an Indian or aboriginal or tribal or regional language die, their survivors understand each other by speaking English or French or Portuguese or some other international language that offers them modernity.

Yet, when a language dies, much of a culture dies with it, and the world is diminished. “Each people has a treasure of knowledge about its environment that is codified in its language,” Rodrigues said. “You lose that language and you lose that code.”

Bruna Franchetto, a linguist at Brazil’s Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, put it in a similar way.

“The extinction of a language is equivalent to the extinction of a species,” she said. “What is lost? Possible variations of a human faculty, the faculty of speech. . . . Each language is a different vision of the world. If we lose a different way of linguistically organizing thought, we lose a possible way of seeing reality.”

Brazilian anthropologists and linguists are working feverishly to defend the Indians from the loss of their language and culture and identity. But strong forces are needed to protect fragile minority languages from the onslaught of the dominant language in a society.

Euskera has the Basque regional government behind it now. Pennsylvania Dutch has the traditions of the Amish and Mennonite religions. These forces may fail.

The Brazilian Indians, however, do not have anything similar to support their languages. Franchetto said the Brazilian government must set up bilingual schools that do not become “places for imposing discipline and cultural assimilation.”

Yet even those may only delay the inevitable.

Long reported from Brasilia and Meisler from the United Nations.