Reading passage Go to the questions
The quiet extinction
There are roughly seven thousand languages spoken in the world today, but they are far from equal in size. More than half of the world's population speaks one of just two dozen languages, while thousands of others are spoken by small communities, some of them by only a handful of elderly people. Linguists estimate that around forty per cent of all living languages are endangered, and that many will no longer be spoken by the end of this century.
Some economists argue that this process, known as language shift, is simply a rational choice. Parents who encourage their children to speak a national or global language are, in this view, opening doors to education and employment, and outsiders have no right to question their decision. This argument contains an important truth: no community should be told which language to speak. Yet it seems to me to ignore how "choices" are often made. In many places, children were punished for speaking their home language at school, and whole generations learned that their language was a sign of backwardness. A choice made under that kind of pressure is hardly free.
What, then, is lost when a language disappears? The most common answer is "knowledge", and it is not an exaggeration. Languages contain detailed vocabularies for local plants, animals and weather patterns, much of which has never been written down. They also preserve ways of organising experience, such as how time is divided or how family relationships are described, that challenge the assumptions built into the world's dominant languages. Linguists who study only a few major languages risk mistaking the habits of those languages for universal features of human thought.
Revival is possible, but it is never easy. Hebrew, which for centuries was used mainly in religious and scholarly writing, became the everyday language of millions of people in the twentieth century. In Wales, the number of children educated through Welsh has risen considerably since the 1970s, and on the Hawaiian islands, immersion preschools established in the 1980s have produced a new generation of young speakers. These successes share one feature: the language was given a place in schools and public life, not only in archives.
This is why I am uneasy about the growing emphasis on documentation. Recording the last fluent speakers of a language is valuable work, and future generations may be grateful for it. But a dictionary and a set of recordings are not a living language, any more than a photograph is a living person. Funding that goes only to documentation can allow governments to feel they have done something while the conditions that are pushing a language towards silence remain unchanged.
The real question, then, is not whether every language can be saved, since some almost certainly cannot, but whether communities that wish to keep their languages are given a genuine opportunity to do so.
