Source: Magazine Good IS
Illustration by: Addison Eaton
Our languages are disappearing even faster than our species, with many estimates projecting the extinction of two languages every two weeks.
Notable linguist and philosopher Dr. John McWhorter has an even bleaker outlook: 90 percent of the world’s approximately 6,000 living languages will likely vanish in just 100 years.
If Dr. McWhorter’s right, we’ll be down to 600 languages by 2115. This estimate’s not entirely new—similar projections first appeared in 1992 in a paper called “The World’s Languages in Crisis.” It comes down to viability: Languages that already have a sure foothold (some activists prefer the term “bully languages”) are going to keep encroaching upon the domains of those less powerful. Today, 78 percent of us speak the 85 most dominant languages in the world; 12 percent speak the weakest 3,500.
Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich liked to say that “language is a dialect with an army.” But some armies just have better weapons than others. Speaking of Yiddish—spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. and more in households around the world—it’s considered by many to be a dying language, or at least not exactly a living one, mainly because it hasn’t been widely embraced by the realm of commerce, and people rarely write it down.
Each time a language disappears, the human experience becomes a little more homogenized. But if we’re communicating, is that really a problem? Economic growth is by far the biggest source of language loss. Why wouldn’t it be? Businesspeople and customers need to talk to each other. And a major reason we’re all so connected through technology these days is because we’re able to relate to each other through just a few shared languages (increasingly English, Mandarin, and Spanish).
845 million people speak Mandarin as a first language, while on Australia’s Goulburn Islands, 400 people speak 10 different languages, more out of respect than necessity. When respect prevails, so do even the “weakest” languages and distinct cultures. But maybe the need for so many languages has gone the way of so many other pre-internet artifacts, like printed books and foldable maps. Distinct languages arose because isolated communities required ways to express specific details about their unique environments. Would it really be so terrible if the language Tuvan, spoken by a relatively small 235,000+ historically nomadic shepherds in Russia—many of whom also speak English, Mandarin,** and Russian—disappeared?
The answer might lie in an untranslateable term like khoj özeeri. To the Tuvan, it’s a method for killing a sheep. As described by Russ Rymer in National Geographic, it also implies kindness, decency, and a very specific ceremony by which a family so gently and neatly kills and prepares a sheep, they’re able to wear their finest attire because they don’t spill any blood. Like language itself, the word is a way to measure the lives of the people who speak it.
