Forty percent of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken worldwide face varying degrees of extinction risk. Economic pressures, urbanization, forced migration, education policies and dominant languages that have spread globally are making it harder for many languages to be passed on to new generations.
When a language falls out of use, it is not only words that disappear. The interruption of language transmission also leads to the loss of cultural identity, oral history and the local knowledge that communities have accumulated over generations about the natural world.
The peak of linguistic diversity came thousands of years ago
The period between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE is described as a “golden age” when linguistic diversity reached its peak in human history. It is estimated that between 30,000 and 75,000 languages were spoken worldwide during this period.
Languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Sumerian and Hittite, which are no longer spoken by communities today, continue to contribute to our understanding of human history, civilizations and the development of languages through the written texts and cultural heritage they left behind.
Experts call for multilingualism to be encouraged
Nicholas Evans, a professor of linguistics at Australian National University, said endangered languages were not merely different means of communication. Evans said that trying to understand the human mind through only a few widely spoken languages was an incomplete approach, and that examining all languages revealed many more ways of being human.
Julia Sallabank, a linguist who conducts research on small and endangered languages at the University of London, said languages had disappeared throughout history but that the process had accelerated in recent years. Sallabank said economic, social and political pressures had driven many communities to abandon their native languages in favor of more widely spoken ones, adding that learning one language did not require giving up another and that multilingualism should be encouraged.
Sallabank said people could learn new languages while preserving their heritage languages. She said research had found that multilingualism supported children’s educational achievement and could delay the onset of dementia symptoms in later life, adding that monolingualism was the exception and multilingualism a widespread reality around the world.
Community support is needed alongside documentation efforts
Sallabank said academic documentation efforts were important but insufficient on their own to revitalize endangered languages. She said local communities played a decisive role in keeping languages alive and that it was critically important for governments to take part in these efforts.
Manx, spoken on the Isle of Man, was cited as an example of language revitalization. After the last native speaker died in 1974, Manx began to be taught again with the support of archival records and the local administration. Today, hundreds of students are being educated in Manx, and approximately 1,500 people can speak the language fluently.
Sallabank explained that language revitalization efforts also had positive effects on public health. She said language programs run among Indigenous communities in Canada had been linked to a decline in suicide rates among young people, while programs in Australia had been associated with lower diabetes rates among Indigenous peoples.
Languages shed light on the past and different ways of life
Evans said that when a language disappears, the knowledge accumulated over generations by the communities that spoke it about nature, history and ways of life is also lost. He said Indigenous languages could contain detailed information about plant and animal species that the scientific community had not yet fully identified, adding that languages also offered clues about communities’ migration routes and histories.
Evans explained that although the Roma had no written histories, linguistic research had traced their origins to northwestern India. He said similar methods had made it possible to obtain detailed information about the past of many communities with no written records.
Evans said oral literature was one of the most powerful areas of language use, adding that the transmission of poetry, epics and oral narratives across generations in societies without a written tradition demonstrated the strength of human memory.
Evans said some Indigenous communities in Southeast Asia had highly developed vocabularies for describing smells, and noted that research had found these communities’ odor memory to be more advanced than that of Western societies. Evans said interaction with different languages offered new perspectives on human experience.
Christopher Moseley, former editor of UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, said the most urgent need for endangered languages was comprehensive documentation. Moseley said time was running out and that documentation could also pave the way for other preservation options.
