Where have all the languages gone?

When linguists raced to Turkey to record Tevfik Esenc in 1992, he had already written the inscription he wanted on his gravestone: "This is the grave of Tevfik Esenc. He was the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh." In another part of the world on the Isle of Man, Ned Maddrell recalled in the 1960s how everyone spoke or could understand Manx when he was growing up just before the turn of the 20th century. Yet a rapid shift to English was already underway even in his youth, and when Maddrell died in 1974, he was the last speaker of Manx. On the other side of the world in north Queensland, Australia, two years before Maddrell’s death, Arthur Bennett died, the last person to know more than a few words of the Mbabaram language, a language he had not used himself since his mother died twenty some years before.

How many more people will share the unenviable fate of Esenc, Maddrell, and Bennett? Today in Alaska 83 year old Marie Smith-Jones, chief of the Eyak Traditional Elders Council, is the last speaker of Eyak. Since her sister Sophia died in 1993, Smith-Jones has had no one to speak to in her native language. Tefvik Esenc, Ned Madrell, and Arthur Bennett lived and died thousands of miles apart, in radically different cultural and economic circumstances. Although the precise factors which destroyed their communities and left them as the last representatives of dying tongues were quite different, their stories are remarkably similar in other ways. Unfortunately, their fates reveal a common pattern, which is but the tip of the iceberg: the world's languages are dying at an alarming rate. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine’s book, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages, tells the story of how and why languages are disappearing.

No one knows how many languages are spoken in the world today, but the number may be as high as 6,700. According to some estimates, we may be losing a language every two weeks. By the time you read this, a few more last speakers may have died, taking their languages with them to extinction. The few remaining modern Celtic languages such as Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton are in great danger, as are the remaining Aboriginal languages of Australia. Other parts of the world reveal the same dismal picture. Spanish and Portuguese have replaced most of the native languages of South America, just as English has overwhelmed the indigenous languages of North America. None of the native American languages left in what is now California is being learned by children. Languages can only exist where there is a community to speak and transmit them. A community of people can exist only where there is a viable environment for them to live in, and a means of making a living. Where communities cannot thrive, their languages are in danger. When languages lose their speakers, they die. At least half, if not more, of the world’s languages will become extinct in the next century. This puts the problem of linguistic extinction on a par with biologists' most pessimistic estimates for species extinction.

Why language loss matters
People can obviously survive without knowledge of their traditional languages, so why does it matter if languages such as Navajo and many hundreds of others die as long as the peoples themselves survive? Isn’t the fact that a growing number of people are speaking an ever smaller number of languages a good rather than a bad thing, likely to remove obstacles to communication and thus lead to better mutual understanding?

Nettle and Romaine see the extinction of languages as part of the larger picture of worldwide near total ecosystem collapse and explain why the maintenance of the earth's many languages has a vital role to play in preserving biodiversity. The greatest linguistic diversity is found in some of the ecosystems richest in biodiversity inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent around 4% of the world's population, but speak at least 60% of its languages. For centuries, resource management has been carried out primarily at local levels by individual communities relying on traditional knowledge passed down orally for generations, much of it encoded in distinctive ways in their languages. Some of the last speakers of dying languages are rich treasure houses of detailed local knowledge. One Palauan traditional fisherman born in 1894, for example, had names for more than 300 different species of fish and knew the lunar spawning cycles of several times as many species of fish as have been described in the scientific literature for the entire world. The disappearance of hundreds of species of fish, birds and other forms of life along with their names and related knowledge of their habitat and behavior represents a huge loss to science at precisely the time when we need most urgently to manage local ecosystems more effectively.

Because a large part of any language is culture-specific, people feel that an important part of their traditional culture and identity is lost too when their language disappears. As one native American, Darryl Babe Wilson, put it: "We must know the white man’s language to survive in this world. But we must know our language to survive forever." The loss of most of the world's languages and cultures may be survivable, but the result will be a seriously reduced quality of life, if not the loss of the very meaning of life itself for some of the people whose unique voices will vanish forever.

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