Half of the world's languages may not survive this century

Linguists estimate that there are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. According to UNESCO, almost half of them are at serious risk of disappearing before the end of the twenty-first century. Some are spoken by only a handful of elderly people. Once these last speakers die, the language is gone, often without leaving a written record. The reasons are not mysterious. Younger generations frequently abandon their parents' language in favour of the dominant national one, which offers better access to education, jobs and media. This is a perfectly rational choice for any individual family. The collective consequence, however, is the erosion of an enormous portion of human cultural heritage. Linguists who work on endangered languages often describe what is being lost in terms that go beyond communication. Each language encodes its own way of organising the world: how to talk about time, family relationships, plants, emotions. When a language disappears, a unique perspective on human experience disappears with it. Not everyone agrees that this loss should be resisted. Some argue that languages have always come and gone, and that what is happening now is simply an unusually rapid version of a normal historical process. Whatever one's view, there are reasons for cautious optimism. Digital tools have made it dramatically easier to record, document and even teach minority languages. Younger speakers in some communities have begun to reclaim languages they had stopped using. Whether these efforts will be enough remains, for now, an open question.