When a language dies, we lose more than just words. We lose a unique perspective on the world, a window into different ways of thinking, and centuries or even millennia of accumulated knowledge and history. According to UNESCO, there are anywhere from 3,000-7,000 languages spoken in the world today, but experts estimate that between 50-90% of these will disappear by the end of this century. With every language that goes extinct, humanity becomes a little more culturally homogeneous and a piece of our intellectual and spiritual inheritance is chipped away forever.
Loss of Identity and Cultural Heritage
Language is deeply intertwined with culture and group identity. When a community shifts to speaking a more dominant language, traditional knowledge, oral histories, poetry, songs, and rituals vanish if they are not written down. Elders are no longer able to pass down their mother tongue to younger generations. Customs, ideas, and worldviews unique to that culture can fade away when their linguistic vessels disappear. The loss of Australia’s hundreds of indigenous languages, for example, has meant irrevocable erosion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage.
This gradual destruction of cultural diversity makes the human story less rich and more homogenized. While globalization has benefits, it also tends to steamroll regional identities. Minority cultures have to fight to keep their traditions alive when their language ceases to be used in everyday life.
Different Frameworks of Thought and Perception
Every language shapes how its speakers perceive and describe the world. The linguist Edward Sapir theorized that the language we speak determines our observations, thought patterns, and habits. For example, languages have varying numbers of color terms – from two basic colors in some aboriginal languages to up to twelve in others. Speakers of languages with fewer color words actually have a harder time distinguishing between colors across the spectrum.
So when small indigenous languages die out, we may lose distinct ways of structuring reality and unique metaphorical relationships. Linguists studying endangered languages often uncover grammatical structures, classificatory systems, and concepts that are foreign to major tongues like English. These revelations give us a glimpse into the sea of diverse cognitive seas humans have swum in.
Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Indigenous groups have sustained themselves in localized ecosystems for centuries, and their ancient languages reflect detailed knowledge of plants, animals, soils, seasons, etc. – knowledge that is increasingly vital to preserving biodiversity as global warming disrupts habitats and food chains.
When the Yagán language of Tierra del Fuego lost its last fluent speaker in 2009, an invaluable repository of geographical information and survival strategies vanished. The Yagán had a rich maritime vocabulary, including words like “dalg” which meant “sea suddenly getting rough in a calm area”. This nuanced understanding of the tribe’s surroundings allowed them to flourish along the Cape Horn archipelago for thousands of years, knowledge now lost forever.
Oral Histories and Myth
Before the recorded word, generations would pass down vital oral histories, cosmologies, hero myths and folk tales through their tongues. Most of humanity’s linguistic past consisted solely of spoken language. So the demise of unwritten languages often represents the erasure of millennia of ancestral memories and stories. Australian Aboriginal tales of great floods documented geological events from 10,000 years ago. The extinction of these unique narratives leaves gaps in our understanding of ancient human cultures.
Potential Linguistic and Scientific Insights
Languages are scientific data sets just as valuable for anthropology as animal specimens are for biology. Linguists studying the structures of threatened languages have derived fascinating insights into how the mind works. For example, research into Piraha’s lack of number words and consonantal sounds informed the influential linguistic theory of Universal Grammar.
We cannot predict all that could be gleaned in the future from the diverse ‘design features’ and organizational principles of the world’s tongues. From linguistic analysis, we have better understood memory, learning patterns, evolutionary psychology, and speech pathologies. When we allow languages to die through indifference, we sacrifice future academic discoveries.
Medical Knowledge
Many indigenous peoples have developed traditional medicines and purification rituals that treat physical and mental illnesses. Only those steeped in the associated language and culture may know the origins, preparation, and applications of ancient remedies. For example, the disappearance of ethnobotanical knowledge in Chácobo and other Amazonian tongues has led to the demise of medicinal plant usage. Rational drug discovery and bioprospecting has only scratched the surface of the pharmacological potential in dying tongues.
Tourism and Preservation of Culture
Living languages act as a drawcard for cultural tourism, which many regional communities rely on. Tourists flock to Hawaii to immerse themselves in the islands’ Polynesian heritages, including the native language. The Maori culture engenders national pride in New Zealand and strengthens its tourism brand. But if languages like Hawaiian and Maori disappear in favor of English, cultural tourism becomes less authentic and compelling. Local economies then miss out on crucial visitor spending. Additionally, younger descendants are deprived of the opportunity torediscover and take pride in their linguistic roots later in life.
Diversity of Human Expression
Every language and dialect provides its own palette of sounds, grammatical oddities, regional phrases, and vocabulary. This uniqueness makes the linguistic map both stunningly varied but delicate and endangered (much like biodiversity). The extinction of even one language winnows the diversity of our modes of expression. It’scomparable to losing a distinct art style or musical tradition. Yes, aspects may live on through vocabulary assimilation into dominant languages. But intrinsic principles and nuances remain lost, homogenizing human discourse.
Value to Linguists and Anthropologists
Languages are cultural artifacts every bit as precious as archaeological ruins or Renaissance paintings. Linguistics experts see each tongue as a work of art molded by thousands of years of cultural shifts and exchanges. They preserve and document these living treasures using records, dictionaries, transcripts and informants. This research has unearthed our earliest languages and traced modern language evolution. Allowing continued language death deprives linguists of ancient ‘roots’ that explain connections between current tongues. It’s like destroying the canvasses of Old Master painters before art historians can analyze them.
Integrity of Communities
Shared language is the blood flowing through the veins of a community, connecting its members across generations and geographies. It provides a sense of common ancestry and belonging. So even when descendants no longer speak their heritage language fluently, its symbolic power remains as a marker of kinship. But once a language disappears completely from a community, their cohesion and integrity is weakened. Preserving minority languages is about believing communities should retain control over their shared communication, rather than dissolving into the homogenous dominant culture.
Human Intelligence and Neural Diversity
Modern neuroscience suggests that language learning can actually alter brain structure and cognition. So our diverse ‘linguistic environments’ may have resulted in slightly different brain wiring across cultures. Therefore, when small languages (and the aptitudes they required) vanish due to globalization, we may inadvertently be stunting the nuanced neural development happening in those communities. The loss of Australian Aboriginal languages, for instance, possibly eliminated unique cognitive skills evolved in that population over 50,000 years. Though speculative, this possibility of ‘neural diversity’ is another dimension to how disappearing languages may diminish human intelligence.
Preserving Languages in the Modern World
So how can the relentless decline of linguistic diversity be halted, or at least slowed? Here are a few policies and initiatives that can protect our imperiled languages:
| Method | Example |
|---|---|
| Official recognition and government funding | New Zealand’s Māori Language Act |
| Documentation programs | Alaska’s Yukon-Koyukuk School District Athabaskan Language Program |
| Cultural revitalization through language schools | Hawaiian language immersion preschools and kindergartens |
| Utilizing social media and technology | Ma! Iwaidja iPhone app for preserving aboriginal languages |
| Linguistic rights legislation | Bolivia’s 2009 constitution declaring 36 native languages official |
| Focusing language education policy on heritage languages | New Zealand’s Māori education strategy |
| Promoting prestige through cultural events and media | The Navajo Nation’s radio/TV programming |
Conclusion
Languages represent absolute peaks of human creativity and identity. When we carelessly discard them, we sacrifice cognitive diversity, cultural spirit, philosophical insights, and ancestral wisdoms refined over ages. This should concern us all as members of the human story. While English has become the global lingua franca, we must ensure it does not wash away humanity’s abundant linguistic achievements like a cultural tsunami. With conscientious policies and activism, diverse tongues can survive alongside world languages, bettering our understanding of consciousness and enriching our shared heritage.