There is nothing more dead than a dying language

SCIENCE LAB: "Not Just Words: Preserving languages gains new importance after UNESCO lists more than 2,400 at risk," by Kari Lydersen, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 23-29 March 2009.

America is a major source of dying languages, virtually all being Native American tongues disappearing. We have lost, by the UN's count, 115 languages over the past 500 years (assuming we don't take the blame on those first 250 years).

Why are languages lost? Languages have been dying for 10,000 years, going back to the dawn of the agricultural era. When everybody's roaming, languages are highly specific to tribe, but once people start settling down and trading a bit, common tongues prevail and the isolated ones are extinguished by time. Anything that encourages connectivity and aggregation of people kills languages, so guess what? Globalization will be the ultimate language killer. Half of the world's remaining 2100 languages will be gone by 2100.

Why the world would still want to be conversing in a thousand languages in 2100 is completely beyond me in terms of communication utility, even as I understand the innate desire for identity retention.

But the real killer here is simply the desire of humans to connect. The more they connect, they more they abandon languages that divide or isolate.

Comments

[Brian Barker]

Concerning the campaign to save endangered and dying languages, you may be interested in the contribution, made by the World Esperanto Association, to UNESCO's campaign for the protection of endangered languages.

The commitment to the campaign was made, by the World Esperanto Association at the United Nations' Geneva HQ in September.http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eR7vD9kChBA&feature=related

An interesting video can also be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a translator with the United Nations in Geneva.

The argument for Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

[ende]

The point isn't just identity retention. Every language brings with it a different way of thinking... ways of thinking that do not necessarily translate to other languages. By losing these languages, we also lose human ideas. Consider it memetic diversity.