The Endangered Language Crisis

 

 

At the heart of linguistics is a radical premise: all languages are equal. This underlies everything we do at the Endangered Language Alliance, an eccentric extended family of linguists, language activists, polyglots and ordinary people, whose mission is to document endangered languages and support linguistic diversity, especially in the world’s hyperdiverse cities.

Language is a universal and democratic fact cutting across all human societies: no human group is without it, and no language is superior to any other. More than race or religion, language is a window on to the deepest levels of human diversity. The familiar map of the world’s 200 or so nation-states is superficial compared with the little-known map of its 7,000 languages. Some languages may specialise in talking about melancholy, seaweed or atomic structure; some grammars may glory in conjugating verbs while others bristle with syntactic invention. Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding and living that should form part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.

Users of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Mandarin, English and the like have continually proclaimed their languages holier, more perfect or more adaptive than the unwritten, unstandardised “dialects” they look down on. But from a linguistic point of view, no language as used by a native speaker is in any way inferior, let alone broken. The vast majority have always been oral, with written language a derivative of comparatively recent vintage, confined to tiny elites in a small number of highly centralised societies. Writing is palpably a trained technology of conscious coding, in comparison with the natural and universal human behaviours of speaking and signing.

Perceptions of linguistic superiority or inferiority are not based on anything about the languages themselves, but on the power, class or status of the speakers. Every language signed or spoken natively is a fully equipped system for handling the core communicative demands of daily life, able to coin or borrow words as needed. “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey,” said the linguist and polyglot Roman Jakobson. In other words: it’s possible to say anything in any language, but each language’s grammar requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously. This is the essence of what makes linguistics fascinating and revealing.

All languages may be equal in the abstract, but much harder to bridge are the social and historical disparities among their speakers. At present, about half of all languages are spoken by communities of 10,000 or fewer, and hundreds have just 10 speakers or fewer. On every continent, the median number of speakers for a language is below 1,000, and in Australia this figure goes as low as 87.

Today, these numbers reflect serious endangerment, and even languages with hundreds of thousands or a few million speakers can be considered vulnerable. In the past, however, small language communities could be quite stable, especially hunter-gatherer groups, which typically comprised fewer than 1,000 people. Likewise, most older sign languages, now critically endangered, evolved in so-called deaf villages, where the incidence of hereditary deafness in the population was significantly higher than elsewhere, though still rarely more than about 2%. Many hearing people in these villages could also sign, but the core group of signers was typically several hundred at most.

 In general, sheer speaker or signer numbers have always mattered less than intergenerational transmission. A small language can apparently remain strong for centuries as long as parents, grandparents and other caregivers are using it with children. Take Gurr-Goni, an Aboriginal language from north-central Arnhem Land in Australia, which has had just several dozen speakers as far back as anyone can remember. Far from being an isolated group, Gurr-Goni speakers maintained their language in a context of multilingual equilibrium, where each “father tongue” was integrally connected with certain ancestral lands and natural resources. It’s this kind of equilibrium that has been vanishing fast as colonial and national languages take over.

But why does linguistic diversity matter in the first place? For a linguist, the answer is clear enough: little-documented, primarily oral languages are often the ones with the most to teach us about the nature and possibilities of human communication more generally. Without the Khoisan languages of southern Africa, we wouldn’t know how extensively and expressively clicks could be used. Without Warao, spoken in Guyana, Venezuela and Suriname, we wouldn’t know that object-subject-verb could be the routine way of ordering a sentence. Without the Hmong-Mien languages of south-east Asia, we wouldn’t know that a language could have a dozen tones.

But it’s also what the languages carry inside them: the poetry, literature, jokes, proverbs and turns of phrase. The oral histories, the local and environmental knowledge, the wisdom, and the lifeways. Only a fraction of this ever can or will be translated into other languages.

If this still sounds theoretical, consider even more immediate, practical consequences. A growing body of research shows that there is no substitute for mother-tongue education, and that language maintenance is an integral component of physical and mental well-being – perhaps especially so for long-marginalised Indigenous and minority peoples.

For this is the crux of it: languages are not “dying natural deaths”, but being hounded out of existence.

 

Like biodiversity, linguistic diversity remains strongest today in remote and rugged regions traditionally beyond the reach of empires and nation states: mountain ranges like the Himalayas and the Caucasus; archipelagoes like Indonesia and the Solomons; and what were once zones of refuge like the Amazon, southern Mexico, Papua New Guinea and parts of west and central Africa. But these too are now under tremendous pressure.

“Language has always been the companion of empire,” wrote Antonio de Nebrija in his 1492 Gramática Castellana, which aimed to raise vernacular Castilian Spanish to the level of Latin and other imperial languages, just in time for European conquests across the globe. Though languages have always changed and come and gone, the scope for linguistic imperialism has widened exponentially since Nebrija’s day. A comparatively small number of empires and nation states, now bristling with 24/7 communication and education systems, cover every inch of the Earth. Worldwide, centuries of imperialism, capitalism, urbanisation, environmental destruction and nation building are now coming to a head linguistically. With power behind them, a few hundred languages keep growing and getting all the resources, while the other 95% struggle.

 

Particularly dominant are just a few dozen languages of wider communication, less politely called “killer languages”. English, Spanish and Chinese are on the march, but so are Nepali and Brazilian Portuguese. These languages are spreading through political, economic and cultural conquest, and the consequences are seeping into everything. At the same time, only under extraordinary circumstances are a few new languages emerging, such as Light Warlpiri, which developed out of mixing English and the Aboriginal language Warlpiri in Australia’s Northern Territory.

In anglophone settler societies such as the US and Canada, genocide, expulsion, disease and every form of prejudice and pressure exerted on Native peoples have profoundly altered the linguistic landscape. About half of the 300 distinct languages once spoken north of the Rio Grande have already been silenced, and most of those remaining are no longer actively used, with under 10 native speakers. Only a few of the largest, including ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee), Diné Bizaad (Navajo) and Yup’ik can in any way be considered “safe”, though profoundly embattled, for the coming decades. Likewise, most of the hundreds of Aboriginal languages once spoken in Australia are either no longer spoken or else down to small clusters of elderly speakers, with just a few still heroically being transmitted.

Dominant-language speakers opine that everything would be easier and better (and peace on Earth!) if everyone would just speak their particular dominant language. But common languages don’t unify in and of themselves – look at many of the world’s civil wars, or the deep divisions in anglophone American society today. The imaginative challenge of big differences is quickly replaced with the narcissism of small ones: scrutinising other people’s accents, sociolects, word choice, tone of voice.

The spheres of use for smaller languages and nonstandard varieties are continually shrinking: they often emerge only in private, yielding as soon as a speaker steps outside. Now the shift is happening inside homes as well. Families around the world are hitching their fate to English and other dominant languages – abandoning not just words, but vast traditions of gesture, intonation, facial expression, conversational style and perhaps even the culture and character behind all these. Only in the face of intense political, economic, religious or social pressures do people stop passing on their mother tongues to children, but today these pressures are everywhere. The disruption of this basic natural process has come to feel almost normal.

Of course English in particular, supercharged by business, pop culture and the internet after centuries of colonial expansion, is the real empire of our time – far more fluid and influential than any political entity. Many English speakers go their entire lives without encountering anything significant they can’t do or get in their language. Whatever the power dynamics of any given conversation, English is pure linguistic privilege, the reserve currency of communication. The push to learn it is an event of planetary significance, swelling a linguistic community of going on half a billion native English speakers worldwide, plus another 1 or 2 billion who know it as a second language. These numbers are growing every day.

Many people think the world, or at least their corner of it, is growing ever more diverse, but monolinguals are increasingly in charge. The monolingual mindset, bone-deep in almost every anglophone American, blocks any real urgency about other languages. A multilingual childhood, only now widely recognised as an inestimable cognitive advantage, can add a whole dimension to someone’s understanding of the world, with a sense of linguistic and cultural perspective. But to do it right, especially for monolingual parents, can require serious effort and resources.

 

What should a monolingual person do? Every time someone speaks, they embody an inherited chain of choices. It can be profoundly useful to be a native speaker of the dominant dialect of a dominant language. Representing the associated “mainstream” culture with every sound means being able to talk to many and sound good to most. Rarely does a dominant-language monolingual need to speak anyone else’s language, and it counts as a charming attempt if they do, a mark of open-mindedness and sophistication or an advanced party trick. Since reading and writing usually hew close to the dominant dialect, book learning is that much easier. A person “without an accent” is by default considered to be smarter or better educated as soon as they open their mouth.

Yet people intensely aware of privilege based on gender, race, class or sexuality seldom consider their linguistic privilege. English or Spanish or Mandarin or Urdu may just seem like the air you breathe. The only cure for monolingualism is to learn other human languages, but it’s at least a start to learn about them, from those who speak them. Maybe there should be a special kind of therapy for monolinguals, where you have to sit listening to a language you can’t understand, without translation but with total patience.

For an academic linguist, this is an occupational hazard. On first meeting, a speaker knows you don’t know their language, but there is a useful ambiguity. If not learning languages, what exactly does a linguist do? Sound systems are entire ecosystems for the ear, but even on an initial listen you can try to make out the shapes of syllables, the qualities of vowels, the puff of aspiration, the bent tongue of a retroflex. There may be clues in the intonation patterns: variations in pitch, rhythm, loudness, voice quality or the length of sounds, which convey not only vibes, but essential information, like how rising pitch in English can signal a yes-no question. Under the rush of unfamiliar sound, flowing at hundreds of syllables a minute, you try to hold back from the scramble for meaning and suss out the structure.

From the glottis to the lips, the whole tract where spoken language happens is just five or six inches long. Across evolutionary eons, a space for eating and breathing gradually took on linguistic uses, not just anywhere but at certain places of articulation: the lips, the teeth, the alveolar ridge, the hard palate and the soft one behind it, the uvula that hangs like a little grape above the throat, the pharynx and the larynx. The tongue – that near-universal symbol of language – darts and bends to make contact wherever it can. For signers, it happens in the hands. (In what follows, I use terms such as speech and oral for the sake of simplicity, but virtually everything here also applies to sign languages.) There are also whistled languages, drum languages and many other ways of emulating speech across space.

To document and describe languages while there is still time ought to be the first task for a linguist. Yet a linguist’s moment of discovery is also almost always the moment of grasping a disappearance. For any outsider claiming to “discover” any human society or culture or language – that is, announcing the existence of some smaller group to the ruthlessly joined-up juggernaut sometimes known as “us” – is also arriving at, and bound up in, the moment of its destruction. The same forces that bring an outside linguist in are bringing everything else as well.

 

The organised movement to preserve the world’s languages is recent. In 1992, the linguist Michael Krauss warned that linguistics would “go down in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated”. This helped light the spark. Inspired by the new push for biodiversity and the growing movement for Indigenous rights, a cohort of linguists and language activists vowed to use new technologies to record and preserve as much as possible of the world’s vanishing linguistic heritage. Ideally, speakers record and document their own languages, and this is now increasingly common.

Language documentation may sound like an obvious priority for linguistics, but it flies in the face of what most linguists have been focusing on for the past 70 years: language, not languages. Following Noam Chomsky, most have been chasing theoretical and computational questions, seeing themselves as Martians trying to document an essentially uniform language called Earthling. Their evidence has come mostly from the largest languages, which happen to be the dominant ones they’re familiar with. Few meaningful universals have emerged from all the armchair theorising and laboratory testing. Theory has its place, of course, but it’s essential that languages be documented on their own terms. The real view from Mars, it turns out, is that linguistic diversity on Earth is far more profound and fundamental than previously imagined.

At the same time, there is an essential toolkit that every language should have: a substantial dictionary, a detailed grammatical description, and a representative corpus of recorded stories, oral histories and other texts showing the language in action, and at least partially transcribed, translated, analysed and archived. To the extent that speakers are willing, these materials should be maximally accessible and archived for posterity. Speakers of larger languages take for granted effectively limitless resources in and about their languages. Forget Siri, speech recognition, automatic translation, spellcheck and other nifty tools: imagine not having a dictionary, any established way of writing or any authority on the language at all, aside from an elder you have to find and ask in person.

It’s one thing to help build arks, or at least archives, but linguists don’t and can’t “save” languages. By definition, every language is limitless as long as speakers are still speaking it or signers are signing it. No language ends on the last page of a dictionary. From a finite number of sounds, words, rules and techniques, speakers form an infinite number of utterances. There is no single way that a community “really speaks”, nor any one authoritative type of data to preserve for all time. Language is too fluid.

Unfortunately, many linguists also dwell on damaging, defeatist abstractions about language “death” and “extinction” while Indigenous scholars state clearly that oppression is the threat, and that reclaiming Indigenous languages is about liberation and recovery from historical trauma. Linguistics, like anthropology, has skeletons in its disciplinary closet. Fighting for endangered languages can only mean fighting on the side of their speakers and signers, and ultimately it’s always up to communities whether and how to keep using their languages. Some have been struggling to do so for centuries; others are less concerned. Of course, there are not only pressures, but also always enticements to learn a dominant language, which may grant access, however limited, to the dominant culture’s resources.

 For some members, the breakdown of a traditional community may feel like emancipation; for others, a disaster. Whether it’s a matter of survival or a question of common sense, the logic of abandoning a smaller mother tongue for work, education, migration, marriage or any number of other reasons can seem unassailable. Once-valued or ingrained connections to ancestors, traditions, territories and knowledge systems can easily seem irrelevant, obscure or simply impossible to access under contemporary conditions.

It’s a powerful-sounding truism, but not quite true, that language and culture are inextricably linked, since group identities in some cases persist after the loss of a language. Nor should anyone feel forced to stay within any particular culture. What matters is that individuals and communities have meaningful options for how they relate to their linguistic pasts and construct their linguistic futures. Given the normal and natural human capacity for multilingualism, maintaining a less widely spoken language need not preclude learning a more widely spoken one.

There are now hundreds of language revitalisation movements around the world, most launched in just the past few decades, creating a wealth of experience for others to draw on. It can feel like nearly impossible work, where even a single new speaker of a highly endangered language counts as a serious triumph, requiring years of dedication. At the same time, scattered speakers are now finding one another in virtual spaces, where language learning options are multiplying and reality-augmenting and artificial intelligence possibilities are on the horizon.

If one critical ingredient has been missing from language revitalisation movements, it is real financial, political, and technical support from majority populations. Speakers of endangered languages almost never encounter outside interest in or knowledge about their languages, while persecution, mockery, and stigma are still common. To the extent that language policy or discussion is on the agenda at all, it relates to specific points of conflict in a few dominant languages, not the collapse of linguistic diversity itself.

For the revivers of endangered languages, a sense of radical futility may be waiting round the bend of every utterance. Where will I speak this? Who will understand me? Who can even tell me if I’m speaking correctly? Will I ever start thinking in the language? When almost no one else is doing it, matching a string of sounds to a meaning can seem downright arbitrary. And yet it is only after ingesting masses of often arbitrary-seeming words that people can process or produce them at speed, and only then that they can start feeling the indescribable sense of what it is to live in a particular language – just as an actor needs to get her lines down cold before even starting to get into character. To try to communicate with what is no longer a tool of communication – to resurrect a whole worldview that is almost over the horizon – is a wonderful madness.

 This is an edited extract from Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues, published by Grove Press UK on 7 March.

Disappearing tongues: the endangered language crisis. By Ross Perlin. The Guardian, February 22, 2024.

In “Language City,” the linguist Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis.

 “Up on the sixth floor of an old commercial building along the sunless canyon of 18th Street, there is a room where languages from all over the world converge.” It makes sense that the Endangered Language Alliance, the only organization in the world focused on “the linguistic diversity of cities,” lives here, in a donated office in the most linguistically diverse metropolis on earth. It is also here that Ross Perlin begins “Language City,” his gorgeous new narrative of New York, as told through the hundreds of languages spoken in its five boroughs.

On any given day, the E.L.A.’s cramped office bursts with people singing in Bishnupriya Manipuri (originally from Bangladesh), writing in Tsou (Taiwan) and recording in Ikota (Gabon). A caller from the Bronx, with a voice “full of longing,” seeks recordings of the language he left at the Mali-Burkina Faso border when he was 7.

Perlin, the co-director of the E.L.A. and an accomplished linguist himself, explains that up to half of the world’s 7,000 languages are likely to die over the next few centuries. But his book is less a lament for the deaths of endangered languages than an account of how, like their speakers, they have built new lives in a place where half the residents speak a language other than English at home.

Perlin retells the familiar story of the city through the lens of its exceptional linguistic history, beginning with Indigenous languages like Lenape (in which Manaháhtaan means “the place where we get bows”). Early settlers included the first 32 Walloon families to live permanently in New Amsterdam and enslaved Kikongo speakers from the Kingdom of the Kongo.

While Massachusetts and Virginia were “fanatically intolerant English-only colonies,” New Amsterdam did not seem to care; in 1643, a priest wrote of finding 18 languages among just a few hundred men. New Yorke soon boasted not just languages like English, Spanish, French and Russian, but also Basque and Breton, Catalan and Maltese. Some 200 years later, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which ended longstanding national-origin immigration quotas, helped make Bengali and Urdu two of the city’s most widely spoken languages.

Throughout, Perlin never misses the chance to reinforce a key point: The history of New York’s lesser-known languages is also that of the traumas of many speakers. Some fled genocide (as in the cases of Western Armenian and Judeo-Greek), others mass deportation (languages of the North Caucuses), racial violence (Gullah, an English-based Creole) or starvation (Irish). Linguistic minorities “have been overrepresented in diaspora,” Perlin points out, because they are “hit hardest by conflict, catastrophe and privation and thus impelled to leave.”

Perlin’s excellent account of the present-day city chronicles six New Yorkers all working, in some way, to extend the lives of their languages. This includes Rasmina, who takes Perlin to “380,” a six-story apartment building in Flatbush that has housed over 100 of the world’s 700 speakers of Seke, a Tibetan-Burman language. Ibrahima runs a website in N’ko, a West African alphabet created in 1949, and Irwin writes poetry in Nahuatl, an Indigenous language he absorbed while listening in at his grandfather’s grocery store in Mexico.

 Husniya plans children’s books in Wakhi, a Pamiri language spoken where Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and China meet. Dianne, probably the last native speaker of Lenape, tells Perlin wistfully, “Now there’s nowhere to hear the language outside the walls of my head.”

It’s hard to be hopeful. Intergenerational transfer of endangered languages is particularly difficult. Still, Perlin builds a compelling case for why preserving them matters not just for the speakers, but for humanity itself. It’s an argument he lives in his own life. (I invite you, too, to binge-watch Perlin’s fascinating YouTube dispatches from China — in Yiddish.) But change is inevitable. As Perlin says, “Someday English, too, will be down to its last speaker.”

About halfway through reading “Language City,” I reached for the Bible, looking for the story of the Tower of Babel. I knew the basics of the Genesis story: At a time when the world had “one language and a common speech,” the people of Babel decided to build a city, with a tower reaching to heaven. God disapproved and “confused” their language “so they would not understand each other.” Work on the city — and the tower — halted.

But I’d forgotten what happened next: God scattered the people of Babel over the face of the earth. “Language City” is a deft refutation of this parable’s moral. Far from scattering, people have instead converged on the city, bringing their words with them. And New York’s towers have never risen higher.

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York | By Ross Perlin | Atlantic Monthly Press | 415 pp. | $28.

 

How To Speak New York. By Deirdre Mask. The New York Times, February 19, 2024. 

Most people think of endangered languages as far-flung or exotic, the opposite of cosmopolitan. “You go to some distant mountain or island, and you collect stories,” the linguist Ross Perlin says, describing a typical view of how such languages are studied. But of the 700 or so speakers of Seke, most of whom can be found in a cluster of villages in Nepal, more than 150 have lived in or around two apartment buildings in Brooklyn. Bishnupriya Manipuri, a minority language of Bangladesh and India, has become a minority language of Queens.

All told, there are more endangered languages in and around New York City than have ever existed anywhere else, says Perlin, who has spent 11 years trying to document them. And because most of the world’s languages are on a path to disappear within the next century, there will likely never be this many in any single place again.

Language loss has been a natural part of human history for centuries, but it was typically small in scale and relatively confined. The lost language could sometimes leave traces in the language that overtook it, what linguists have called a “grammatical merger” of intersecting societies.

About 30 years ago, though, the linguists Ken Hale and Michael Krauss warned of a new, more dire form of loss in which a dominant language would “simply overwhelm Indigenous, local languages and cultures.” Hundreds of languages were essentially gone, Krauss noted, and others were quickly fading. Several were spoken by as few as one or two people.

As Perlin writes in his new book — “Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York,” out this month — what stands to be lost is more than mere words. “Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding and living that should rightly form a major part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.”

With Daniel Kaufman, also a linguist, Perlin directs the Endangered Language Alliance, in Manhattan. When E.L.A. was founded, in 2010, Perlin lived in the Chinese Himalayas, where he studied Trung, a language with no standard writing system, dictionary or codified grammar. (His work helped establish all three.) He spent most of his time in the valley where the largest group of remaining speakers lived; the only road in or out was impassable in winter.

After three years, Perlin returned to New York City, where he had grown up. At that time, E.L.A. conducted language surveys on foot, canvassing neighborhoods and posting fliers seeking speakers of endangered languages. Most of the work was directed by the organization’s founders: two linguists, including Kaufman, and a poet.

In 2016, E.L.A. began to map the languages spoken in the city. A vast majority were not recognized by large businesses, schools or city government. Officially, Perlin said, they were simply not there. “None of the communities with whom we planned to partner were recorded as even existing in the census,” Kaufman and Perlin later wrote.

 Since their project began, Perlin and Kaufman have located speakers of more than 700 languages. Of those languages, at least 150 are listed as under significant threat in at least one of three major databases for the field. Perlin and Kaufman consider that figure to be conservative, and Perlin estimates that more than half of the languages they documented may be endangered.

A language’s endangerment is not simply a function of its size but also a measure of its relationship to the societies around it. Sheer numbers “have always mattered less than intergenerational transmission,” Perlin writes in “Language City.” Until recently, in many regions of the world, dozens of languages lived side by side, each with no more than a few thousand speakers. Gurr-goni, an Aboriginal Australian language, had long been stable with 70. A language survives, Perlin writes, by sharing life with those who speak it: “Only in the face of intense political, economic, religious or social pressures do people stop passing on their mother tongues to children.”

When Perlin visited Seke-speaking Nepali villages in 2019 and 2023, he found that many of the people he wanted to speak with had left to find work. “Whole age groups were missing,” he says. Kaufman points to Mixtec, a group of Indigenous languages spoken in south-central Mexico, with 500,000 speakers. The differences in how the language is spoken from village to village can be “bigger than you find between French and Italian,” he said. “And there are villages where there are essentially no young people.” Their children are now born elsewhere — Culiacán, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles. “500,000 speakers can disappear in a generation.”

Perlin studies languages for what they communicate both explicitly and indirectly. A language’s lexicon is not “just one word after another,” he writes in “Language City,” but a representation of the enduring preoccupations of a culture. Its rules of grammar are held together by invisible selections of what will be conveyed and what will be overlooked. It “requires speakers to mark out certain parts of reality and not others, however unconsciously.”

When Perlin and Kaufman document a language, they work alongside native speakers to transcribe and translate video interviews that are recorded locally and during trips to a language’s home region. (Perlin and Kaufman have helped produce some of the first dictionaries and grammars of these languages.) To document Seke, for example, Perlin works with Rasmina Gurung, a 26-year-old nurse who happens to be one of the youngest Seke speakers in the world. Most Seke speakers, about 500 people, live across five neighboring villages in northern Nepal, near Tibet. Though the villages are within walking distance, each has developed its own Seke dialect. Like many of the smaller languages of “traditional face-to-face societies,” Perlin writes, Seke has no “formal, all-purpose hello,” because villagers live among the same groups of people and rarely encounter a Seke-speaking stranger. Instead, a question — Where are you going? What are you doing? — would be more common.

When E.L.A. researchers travel to interview speakers in their home regions, they may begin with a list of common questions, but the conversations are often more free-form. “Whatever the speakers want to talk about the most, we always encourage that,” Gurung says. “We always want to understand the language better, but we need to understand where it came from, how it came to be. Whatever’s close to home.”

 As E.L.A. produced its first language maps, the institute’s work caught the eye of Thelma Carrillo, a research scientist in the city’s Health Department. Carrillo, who is part Zapotec, was working on a Latino health initiative, but the city had what Perlin and Kaufman found to be “no basic demographic information” on New Yorkers from Indigenous communities in Latin America, even though they have been migrating here in large numbers since the 1990s.

“We found ourselves in this odd position of being a conduit between the Indigenous Latin Americans of the city and the city agencies, because other organizations that work with them see them as Mexican or Guatemalan,” Kaufman says. “We’re working with their languages, which becomes extremely important when you need to communicate something to them.”

By the start of the pandemic, the city had begun official outreach in nine Indigenous languages and recorded videos in several other endangered languages. By reaching these communities in their own languages, New York City offered what is almost certainly the first official recognition that they exist.

Still, Perlin and Kaufman are keenly aware that the corpus they are building — word by word and sometimes syllable by syllable — might someday turn out to be a kind of fossil record.

Outside of the office, Gurung mostly speaks Seke in voice notes to elders overseas or to tell her mother a secret she doesn’t want her sister to hear. On her first trip to Nepal with E.L.A., she ended every interview with the same question: “Do you think our language will survive?”

Methodology

The maps showing endangered languages in New York City are based on a map provided by the Endangered Language Alliance. We cross-referenced E.L.A.’s New York City language list with three independent databases that track the threat level of languages around the world: Ethnologue, which catalogs all known living languages in the world; UNESCO’s World Atlas of Languages, a survey of all the languages spoken in UNESCO member states; and the Endangered Languages Project, a site to which the public can contribute content, managed by the First Peoples’ Cultural Council and the Endangered Languages Catalogue (ELCat) project at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Each of these projects determines how threatened a language is in a slightly different way. Criteria include the number of global speakers and whether multiple generations speak the language and are passing it on to the next. Additional languages were added in consultation with E.L.A.

The audio clips are excerpts from audio provided by E.L.A., which also provided the translations. In one instance, small adjustments to the translation were made to provide context that would have been clear to the speaker. The translation for Ibrahima Traore's remarks comes from Coleman Donaldson.

The Endangered Languages of New York. By Alex Carp. The New York Times Magazine,  February 22, 2024. 

Once a month, on the sixth floor of an old Manhattan office building, about a dozen people gather to try to speak one of the island’s original languages. Our teacher is Karen Hunter, who learned Lenape as an adult on a tribal reserve in Ontario, in the company of the last native speakers and the first revivalists. For more than a decade, she has been driving up to ten hours to and from New York and other locales to share what she knows, without compensation, with indigenous people (Ramapo, Matinecock, Montaukett) and interested others. These sessions at the Endangered Language Alliance, the nonprofit I codirect, may represent the first time Lenape has been taught in the city since the eighteenth century, when almost all of its speakers were driven out.

Today, colonial settler cities such as New York, Sydney, and Vancouver are among the most multilingual in history. Walking through their streets, you’ll hear Spanish, Tagalog, and Hebrew, but you’ll never encounter autochthonous languages like Lenape (New York), Darug (Sydney), or Squamish (Vancouver). Our cities’ remarkable diversity was preceded by acts of expulsion and dispossession that destroyed long histories of earlier settlement along with the languages that made settlement possible. If patterns continue, nearly half of the world’s approximately six thousand languages could be silenced, the planetary cultural collapse mirroring the ongoing elimination of plant and animal species.1 Anglophone settler societies like the United States constitute the center of the emergency. As many as half of the three hundred languages once spoken by the indigenous peoples of North America are already effectively gone, and fewer than twenty of those remaining—major languages like Cherokee, Navajo, and Yup’ik—are predicted to survive the coming decades.2 Likewise, after centuries of systematic disenfranchisement, many First Nations languages in Canada and Aboriginal languages in Australia are now spoken only by small clusters of elderly people.

Karen’s Lenape sessions are part of an unprecedented, decentralized global effort at cultural reclamation, which crystallized when the United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages. Activists from hundreds of communities around the world, many of them very small in number, are intensifying the pioneering twentieth-century models of language renewal, such as those that swelled the population of speakers of Hebrew, Basque, Welsh, and Māori. Passing the language on to children at home is critical to any revitalization effort, but it can be crushingly difficult. Successful alternative approaches include the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program, developed in California in 1993 and now spreading to Canada and Australia, which pairs older speakers with younger learners for ten or more hours per week. All participants are paid and immersed in the language outside the classroom, ideally in hands-on, culturally relevant settings. The grassroots, activist-driven Hawaiian-language movement, another remarkable model, has built an entire education system from the ground up, offering everything from “language nests” for preschoolers to graduate studies in Hawaiian. The Welsh are using poetry and music to renew their language (still famously robust, given its geographic proximity to language-killing English).

Reawakening dormant languages requires extraordinary acts of coordination—administrative, social, and emotional—but it is possible. Take jessie “little doe” baird, a Wôpanâak woman who, when pregnant with her fifth child, Mae Alice, had a vision of reviving her ancestral language—the first tongue the Pilgrims encountered in coastal Massachusetts, which had been without speakers for more than a century. baird studied linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then spent the next twenty-six years leading a revival of Wôpanâak; Mae Alice is the first Wôpanâak-speaking child in generations. In Ohio, activist Daryl Baldwin has spearheaded the revival of Myaamia, dormant since the 1960s, first teaching it to himself, his wife, and their four children. Common to both community-led efforts was meticulous linguistic research that fed into the creation of immersion programs focused on fostering fluent new speakers.

Documentary records play a crucial role, especially when there are no living native speakers. In the early twentieth century, the American linguist J. P. Harrington collected approximately thirteen hundred recordings of ninety American Indian languages on fragile wax cylinders and aluminum discs. Harrington was a complex figure, but he was dedicated to languages, and he worked closely with native speakers for extended periods. For many American Indian language activists, the road to revival begins with Harrington’s archive, which is housed at the Smithsonian. Over the past twenty-five years, a new generation of linguists has followed in Harrington’s footsteps, creating the subdiscipline of language documentation and producing audio and video recordings, dictionaries, grammar manuals, and articles on an unprecedented scale, all of which feed the revitalization movement. Yet these initiatives are not without complications: Tensions between community goals and outsider or academic methods have moved many linguists to recalibrate, and much linguistic research on smaller communities is still undertaken by missionaries motivated by the dream of translating the Gospel. The gold standard is the native-speaker linguist from the community, but there are often tensions within communities, too.

Globally, language revitalization is both a product and a symbol of the half-century-old “demographic revolution” occurring in indigenous communities of the United States, Canada, Brazil, and elsewhere, from the Sámi of Scandinavia to the Mapuche of Chile and western Argentina. After centuries of decimation, indigenous groups are growing at a far greater pace than the general population, due not only to high birth rates but also to changing attitudes toward these cultures, which has led more people from mixed backgrounds to proudly acknowledge their indigenous roots. Official recognition of a language—whether it’s Tamazight (Berber) in Algeria or all twenty native languages of Alaska—can be useful for a community’s perceived strength, but rising incomes, political autonomy, and principled policies are also essential to any population’s tangible gains.

Urbanization is the linchpin of linguistic maintenance and revitalization. If smaller languages are to survive, they will have to do so in cities, where the majority of humanity now lives. An estimated 50 percent of indigenous people reside in urban areas—from the Mohawk steelworkers of Brooklyn to the residents of the Little Earth housing complex in Minneapolis to those living in the Toba barrio in Buenos Aires—where their families may have been settled for generations, or where they may have been forced to relocate. In some countries, such as Canada, Brazil, Bolivia, and Chile, the ratio is reported to be even higher. These communities often remain invisible to outsiders, and in some places, such as “the Block” in the Sydney suburb of Redfern, they are threatened again by redevelopment. Even so, in both Canada and Australia, the urban indigenous population is increasing much faster than the general urban population. New York City is home not only to the largest concentration of American Indians in the United States (at a total of 111,749 members, according to the 2010 census) but also to tens of thousands of recently arrived indigenous Latin Americans from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and elsewhere, most of them uncounted by the census. Population density usually coincides with concentrated public and private resources, which can support crosscutting alliances, such as the nonprofit Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations’ Los Angeles committee, which includes individuals from at least eight different indigenous Mexican groups, as well as members who identify as mestizo. Cities also facilitate encounters with the worlds of media and the arts, where messages can be articulated in new keys.

But if cities are crucibles for the formation of new composite identities, they are also sieves, where all but the dominant few cultures can quickly drain away. Urban spaces that foster subcultures are often destabilizing to cultures historically anchored in language, family, and land. As scholars Naama Blatman-Thomas and Libby Porter put it, cities have been “sites for expressing and actualizing colonial power,” such that indigenous people have experienced “vast symbolic dispossession, which has left them essentialized as non-urban while imposing structural limitations on their ability to assert their sovereignty in urban contexts.”3

Still, even if urban conditions discourage landownership and intergenerational settlement, there remains power in language. Forward-thinking cities around the world are enhancing efforts to accommodate mother tongues and encouraging multilingualism in schools and other institutions. (“Language access,” the legal right to translation and interpretation, has greatly improved in New York since 2008, when the local government committed to providing basic services in the city’s six most widely spoken languages.) But when it comes to smaller indigenous languages and cultures with fewer resources, the changes have been primarily symbolic. In many places, an indigenous presence is newly visible in land acknowledgments, celebrations of Indigenous Peoples’ Day (replacing Columbus Day), memorial plaques, and other public events. In a few cases, city agencies—such as the New York City Department of Health, which had been developing a health initiative specifically for indigenous people—are beginning to recognize the importance of engaging with urban indigenous communities. Rare are more substantive initiatives, such as the controversial 2015 native title settlement between the Noongar Nation and the provincial government of Western Australia, which recognized traditional Noongar ownership of an area encompassing the major metropolitan region of Perth and calculated belated compensation accordingly.

The revival of a language is not only a triumph of creativity and continuity—it is also a significant step toward restitution and recovery after the five centuries of colonialism and nationalism that have led to the current linguistic extinction event. Individuals and communities should have meaningful options as to how they relate to their pasts and construct their linguistic futures. Though hundreds of the world’s endangered languages are still likely to disappear over the next century, the language revitalization movement is demonstrating that some may be able to survive, evolve, and coexist with more widely spoken languages. If one critical ingredient has been lacking in the efforts to revive indigenous cultures, languages, and communities, it is active financial and official support from majority populations. Through our institutions, foundations, schools, and governments, majority populations need to support the revitalizers, as a matter of justice.

Ross Perlin is codirector of the Endangered Language Alliance.

Talk of the Town : Ross Perlin on endangered languages. By Ross Perlin. Artforum, Vol. 58, Nr. 2, October 2019. 

Half of the world’s languages are endangered and more than a thousand are expected to be lost in coming decades. A team at UCL is using animation software to preserve these languages in an entirely new way.

It’s estimated that there are over 7,000 documented languages spoken across the world. Yet around half of these languages are endangered. Between 1950 and 2021, around 230 languages were wiped from human memory. About 1,500 endangered and rare languages are at a high risk of being lost in the next century.

The consequences of language loss – also known as linguicide - are felt around the world, affecting identity and well-being as well as culture and linguistic diversity.

In response to this growing trend, an anthropologist and architect at UCL have come together to present and preserve some of these languages in a truly unique way, using inspiration and technology from animation in the gaming industry.

Reimagining language

Language is often only imagined in the shape dictated by our writing system - as words on a page or as sound. But the ‘shape’ of humanity’s natural languages and their high-dimensional form mostly remain to be fully explored and modelled as visual material – similar to how we envision the double helix of DNA.

Rather than only listening to a recording, scientists have now made it possible to also handle a language excerpt physically, by building 3D printed models based on language patterns and grammar.

As part of a study published in Nature’s Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, scientists explored how the structure of language can be represented in 3D using software commonly used for game, film and video animation.

To create their 3D designs, they drew on the sounds of a language – the number of syllables in a line – as well as its grammar, focusing on a particular grammatical system called evidentials. They gave a numerical value to “evidential weight” – that is, the nature of the evidence being conveyed. In one of the languages they focused on - the Amazonian language Tariana - speakers are grammatically obliged to indicate the nature of the evidence they’re conveying at all times, unlike in English, where this isn’t required. Tariana contains a hierarchy of preferred evidentials, ranging from information obtained through direct visual observation to the repetition of information related by someone else.

They plotted points in three dimensions, with the numerical values derived from evidentials along the Z axis, the number of syllables along the Y axis and timeline on the X axis. The design software then turned these points into a 3D shape, virtually filling in the digital weave of warp and weft to appear as a smooth, woven undulating surface.

The researchers were then able to create four prototypes and digital 3D images from this, which they printed as 3D objects.

 The first of its kind in the world, the project and its outputs not only enable the visual demonstration of the architecture of language, but also enables its preservation in a permanent, solid form.

Crossing boundaries

The multi-disciplinary study brought together Dr Alex Pillen (UCL Anthropology) and PhD candidate Emma-Kate Matthews (Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL). Dr Pillen explains: “The seed of the idea for this work came from our initial conversations - with each of us coming at this from our own different disciplines.

“At the time, I was just finishing a book project, and I felt that I couldn't quite come up with a single image that would go on the cover.

“And I thought, well, what if I could create an image that roughly would be the architecture of the Kurdish language incurred through an abstract design that could be used as the cover?

“Then more people were saying, ‘Well, we should put in some comparative materials. It shouldn't just be about Kurdish.’

“We then contacted colleagues who are looking at Amazonian languages – and then I had a PhD student who worked on Akkadian, an ancient language, who agreed to code it. Then a colleague suggested we could add English as well, which we did.” 

Dr Pillen explains: “We've focused on one single grammatical system that is most prominent in Native American, Amazonian and Aboriginal languages - evidentials. Grammar is complex in these languages, and these are precisely the languages that are under threat.

The researchers say that visualising words and grammar in 3D offers a palpable new way to preserve languages that will not leave behind a written record, or whose complex patterns are often lost in translation - documenting endangered languages and enhancing grammatical understanding - and bringing to life ancient languages no longer spoken for future generations.

“We do, of course, have recordings of these languages to preserve the way they sound, while the vocabulary can be preserved in a dictionary. But what is more difficult to preserve is the grammar, because this is often presented in a very dry manner by linguists.

“You get transcripts, annotated with very technical terminology. But by producing the geometry of grammar in 3D, we allow people to have an immediate intuitive relationship to these languages that are under threat - or that might disappear.”

As well as its implications for recording language in an era of rapid loss of linguistic diversity, the scientists say that 3D printing words and phrases also enables them and their students to use spatial intuition to get to know the patterns of languages that we do or do not speak.

“In terms of spatial intuition, you can immediately see in terms of - for example, the Tariana example - if you hold it in your hand, there is an immediate sensation of its complexity, which I would say the kind of books written by linguists, with all the technical detail about grammar, don't achieve,” Dr Pillen adds.

 Dr Pillen also notes that it isn’t just languages under threat of extinction that are experiencing linguicide.

“This is not only about preservation of languages that are endangered - but also about linguistic loss,” she says.

“Some Amazonian language, Aboriginal languages, North American languages are facing extinction - but there are several other languages spoken by sizeable populations who have been faced with language loss, such as the Kurdish language.

“In Turkey and Syria, where language policies obstruct the standardisation of language, and schooling in the Kurdish mother tongue, communities suffer a loss of culture, and loss of linguistic heritage.

“It's for people like that that these models are also important as a solid object to reflect that predicament of loss. Our method allows for aspects of an intangible heritage to become tangible - a rare form of solidity for people who have often lost so much.”

The researchers say that there is more they’d like to do with the technology they’ve developed to further enhance learning and language preservation.

“At the moment, these are language excerpts that are frozen in time representing very short speech moments,” Dr Pillen adds. “Now, what would be amazing is to use larger datasets to create moving images of evolving shapes in natural language.”

 Feature: Preserving endangered languages as 3D shapes. University College Of London, January 25, 2023. 

Climate crisis could be ‘final nail in the coffin’ for half of all surviving languages, say linguists, as coastal communities are forced to migrate

Every 40 days a language dies. This “catastrophic” loss is being amplified by the climate crisis, according to linguists. If nothing is done, conservative estimates suggest that half of all the 7,000 languages currently spoken will be extinct by the end of the century.

Speakers of minority languages have experienced a long history of persecution, with the result that by the 1920s half of all Indigenous languages in Australia, the US, South Africa and Argentina were extinct. The climate crisis is now considered the “final nail in the coffin” for many Indigenous languages and with them, the knowledge they represent.

“Languages are already vulnerable and endangered,” says Anastasia Riehl, the director of the Strathy language unit at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Huge factors are globalisation and migration, as communities move to regions where their language is not spoken or valued, according to Riehl.

“It seems particularly cruel,” she says, that most of the world’s languages are in parts of the world that are growing inhospitable to people.

Vanuatu, a South Pacific island nation measuring 12,189 sq km (4,706 sq miles), has 110 languages, one for each 111 sq km, the highest density of languages on the planet. It is also one of the countries most at risk from the climate crisis, she says.

 “Many small linguistic communities are on islands and coastlines vulnerable to hurricanes and sea level rise.” Others live on lands where rising temperature threaten traditional farming and fishing practices, prompting migration.

“When climate change comes in, it disrupts communities even more,” says Riehl. “It has a multiplier effect, the final nail in the coffin.”

Although the effects of global heating on language have not been well studied, it has caused increased instances of heatwaves, droughts, floods and sea level rise, which have already exposed millions of people to food insecurity, water shortages and driven them from their homes. Disasters, the majority of them weather related, accounted for 23.7m internal displacements in 2021, up from 18.8m in 2018. Over the past 10 years, Asia and the Pacific were the regions most affected by displacement worldwide, with the Pacific island states the worst by population size.

Yet, it is precisely here where many Indigenous languages have thrived. One in five of the world’s languages are from the Pacific, according to the New Zealand Māori language commission.

“The Pacific, including the Philippines, India and Indonesia, has a lot of linguistic diversity. Some languages only have a few hundred speakers,” says Anouschka Foltz, an associate professor in English Linguistics at the University of Graz, in Austria.

“If sea level rise or another climate impact hits, they have to leave. Communities scatter to places where their language is not valued.”

 A map of the world’s 577 critically endangered languages reveals clusters around equatorial Africa and in the Pacific and the Indian ocean region.

In response to the crisis, the UN launched the International Decade of Indigenous Languages in December. Preserving languages of Indigenous communities is “not only important for them, but for all humanity,” the UN general assembly president, Csaba Kőrösi, said, urging countries to allow access to education in Indigenous languages.

“With each Indigenous language that goes extinct, so too goes the thought, the culture, tradition and knowledge it bears,” said Kőrösi, echoing the sentiments of Ken Hale, the late US linguist and activist, who compared losing any language to “dropping a bomb on the Louvre”.

Dr Gregory Anderson is director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a non profit based in the US that documents and records endangered languages.

“We are heading for a catastrophic language and cultural loss into the next century,” he says.

Anderson notes that the death of a language, when the last fluent speaker dies, is often the result of “some sort of assault” on Indigenous communities. It can be overt, such as when Indigenous children were forced into boarding schools and banned from speaking their native language in countries including the US, Canada, Australia and Scandinavian nations in the 1900s, or covert, where people with a strong accent are excluded from jobs.

Studies show that, while the suppression of Indigenous language is associated with mental health problems, the reverse can also be true. One study in Bangladesh showed that Indigenous youth capable of speaking their native language were less likely to consume alcohol or illicit substances in risky amounts, and were less exposed to violence.

 Books written in the Quechua Indigenous language sit behind a student during a class on medicinal plants, at a public primary school in Licapa, Peru, Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2021.

View image in fullscreen

Some efforts to save Indigenous languages have been successful, with the introduction of ‘immersion schools’ for young children being particularly effective. Photograph: Martín Mejía/AP

There are some bright spots, too: such as New Zealand and Hawaii, where Indigenous languages have been resurrected.

In the 1970s, only 2,000 native speakers of Hawaiian remained, most in their seventh decade of life, but advocates launched “immersion schools”, where children are taught in Hawaiian. Today, more than 18,700 people speak it. In New Zealand, only 5% of young Māori people spoke the language in the 1970s, but due largely to efforts by the Māori, backed by the government, more than 25% now speak it.

 Prof Rawinia Higgins, a member of the Global Taskforce for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032 and the New Zealand Māori language commissioner says: “Indigenous languages are an anchor to the past, as well as a compass to the future. Thirty-five years ago, people fought to save the Māori language with the government of the day boldly making it an official language protected by law. Once banned and seen by many as worthless, now more than eight in 10 of us see it as part of our identity as New Zealanders.”

The New Zealand broadcaster, journalist and Māori interpreter Oriini Kaipara was taught the language by her grandparents, in kōhanga reo, or “language nests” where only Māori is spoken.

 “My generation were fortunate enough to be raised in total immersion,” says Kaipara, who, as a primetime newsreader with a Māori chin marking, or moko kauae, has become an ambassador for Māori. “But language loss is still a huge threat to us. Those generations who were native speakers, held the customs, the understanding, the indigenous knowledge that was handed down by their parents. And that has gone.”

Māori have a “unique way” of connecting with their environment that is only accessible through their language, she says. The word matemateāone is almost untranslatable into English, she said, but expresses “a deep, emotional, spiritual, physical” longing for the Earth. “In essence, it means I belong,” she says. “My language is a gateway to my world.”

 This article was amended on 17 January 2023. An earlier version said the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages is based at the University of South Africa; it is actually a non-profit based in the US. An amendment on 26 April 2023, clarified that Anastasia Riehl described Vanuatu as being one of the countries most at risk from the climate crisis, not sea level rise, as we had previously said.

Lost for words: fears of ‘catastrophic’ language loss due to rising seas. By Karen McVeigh. The Guardian, January 16, 2023. 

 Endangered languages have sentimental value, it’s true, but are there good philosophical reasons to preserve them?

The year 2010 saw the death of Boa Senior, the last living speaker of Aka-Bo, a tribal language native to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. News coverage of Boa Senior’s death noted that she had survived the 2004 tsunami – an event that was reportedly foreseen by tribe elders – along with the Japanese occupation of 1942 and the barbaric policies of British colonisers. The linguist Anvita Abbi, who knew Boa Senior for many years, said: ‘After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years. She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people.’

Tales of language extinction are invariably tragic. But why, exactly? Aka-Bo, like many other extinct languages, did not make a difference to the lives of the vast majority of people. Yet the sense that we lose something valuable when languages die is familiar. Just as familiar, though, is the view that preserving minority languages is a waste of time and resources. I want to attempt to make sense of these conflicting attitudes.

The simplest definition of a minority language is one that is spoken by less than half of some country or region. This makes Mandarin – the world’s most widely spoken language – a minority language in many countries. Usually, when we talk of minority languages, we mean languages that are minority languages even in the country in which they are most widely spoken. That will be our focus here. We’re concerned especially with minority languages that are endangered, or that would be endangered were it not for active efforts to support them.

The sorrow we feel about the death of a language is complicated. Boa Senior’s demise did not merely mark the extinction of a language. It also marked the loss of the culture of which she was once part; a culture that was of great interest to linguists and anthropologists, and whose extinction resulted from oppression and violence. There is, in addition, something melancholy about the very idea of a language’s last speaker; of a person who, like Boa Senior, suffered the loss of everyone to whom she was once able to chat in her mother tongue. All these things – the oppression until death of a once thriving culture, loneliness, and losing loved ones – are bad, regardless of whether they involve language death.

Part of our sadness when a language dies, then, has nothing to do with the language itself. Thriving majority languages do not come with tragic stories, and so they do not arouse our emotions in the same ways. Unsurprisingly, concern for minority languages is often dismissed as sentimental. Researchers on language policy have observed that majority languages tend to be valued for being useful and for facilitating progress, while minority languages are seen as barriers to progress, and the value placed on them is seen as mainly sentimental.

Sentimentality, we tend to think, is an exaggerated emotional attachment to something. It is exaggerated because it does not reflect the value of its object. The late philosopher G A Cohen describes a well-worn, 46-year-old eraser that he bought when he first became a lecturer, and that he would ‘hate to lose’. We all treasure such things – a decades-old rubber, our children’s drawings, a long-expired train ticket from a trip to see the one we love – that are worthless to other people. If the value of minority languages is mainly sentimental, it is comparable to the value that Cohen placed on his old eraser. It would be cruel to destroy it deliberately, yet it would be unreasonable for him to expect society to invest significant resources preserving it. The same might be true of minority languages: their value to some just doesn’t warrant the society-wide effort required to preserve them.

There are a couple of responses to this. First, the value of minority languages is not purely sentimental. Languages are scientifically interesting. There are whole fields of study devoted to them – to charting their history, relationships to other languages, relationships to the cultures in which they exist, and so on. Understanding languages even helps us to understand the way we think. Some believe that the language we speak influences the thoughts we have, or even that language is what makes thought possible. This claim is associated with the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which the linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker at Harvard has described as ‘wrong, all wrong’.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is certainly linked to a variety of dubious myths and legends, such as the pervasive but false belief that Eskimos have a mind-bogglingly large number of words for snow. But its core idea is not as wrong-headed as Pinker believes. While there is little evidence that thought would not be possible at all without language, there is plenty of evidence that language influences the way we think and experience the world. For example, depending on which language they are using, fluent German-English bilinguals categorise motion differently, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals represent the passage of time differently, and Dutch-Farsi bilinguals perceive musical pitch differently. Even Pinker apparently finds the link between thought and language compelling: he believes that thoughts are couched in their own language, which he calls ‘mentalese’. In any case, this debate can be settled only empirically, by studying as many different languages (and their speakers) as possible. Which leaves little doubt that languages are valuable for non-sentimental reasons.

Second, let’s take a closer look at sentimental value. Why do we call some ways of valuing ‘sentimental’? We often do this when someone values something to which they have a particular personal connection, as in the case of Cohen and his eraser. Cohen calls this sort of value personal value. Things that have personal value are valued much less by people who do not have the right sort of personal connection to them. Another way of being sentimental is valuing something that is connected to someone or something that we care about. This sort of value is behind the thriving market in celebrity autographs, and it is why parents around the world stick their children’s drawings to the fridge.

 The term ‘sentimental’ is gently pejorative: we view sentimentality as an inferior sort of value (compared with, say, practical usefulness), although we are often happy to indulge each other’s sentimental attachments when they don’t cause us inconvenience. Parents’ sentimentality about their kids’ drawings is not inconvenient to others, but sentimentality about minority languages often is, since they require effort and resources to support. This helps to explain why minority languages, to some people, are just not worth the bother.

However, sentimentality is not so easily set aside. Our culture is underpinned by values that, on close inspection, look very much like sentimentality. Consider the following comparison. We can all agree that it is sentimental of Cohen to insist (as he did) that he would decline an opportunity to upgrade his old eraser to a brand-new one. Yet were the Louvre to decline an offer from a skilled forger to exchange the Mona Lisa for an ‘improved’ copy that eliminated the damage suffered over the years by the original, we are unlikely to view this decision as sentimental. On the contrary, were the museum to accept the forger’s offer, we could expect to find this shocking story make headlines around the world. Our contrasting attitudes disguise the fact that the values involved in these two cases are very similar. In each case, an item with a certain history is valued over another, somewhat improved, item with a different history.

This sort of value is ubiquitous. We preserve such things as medieval castles, the Eiffel Tower and the Roman Colosseum not because they are useful but because of their historical and cultural significance. When ISIS fighters smashed 5,000-year-old museum exhibits after capturing Mosul in 2015, outraged journalists focused on the destroyed artefacts’ links with ancient and extinct cultures. Historical and cultural significance is part of why we value languages; indeed, the philosopher Neil Levy has argued that it is the main reason to value them. These ways of valuing things are labelled sentimental in some contexts. If minority languages are valuable partly for sentimental reasons then they are in good company.

While valuing minority languages is often viewed as sentimental, it is just as often admired. The documentary We Still Live Here (2010) tells the story of the revival of the Wampanoag language, a Native American language that was dead for more than a century. The film celebrates the language’s revival and the efforts of Jessie Little Doe Baird, who spearheaded its revival, whose ancestors were native speakers, and whose daughter became the revived language’s first native speaker. Baird received a MacArthur Fellowship to carry out her project, and her success attracted widespread media attention and honours, including a ‘Heroes Among Us’ award from the Boston Celtics basketball team.

Across the Atlantic, Katrina Esau, aged 84, is one of only three remaining speakers of N|uu, a South African ‘click’ language. For the past decade, she has run a school in her home, teaching N|uu to local children in an effort to preserve it. In 2014, she received the Order of the Baobab from the country’s president, Jacob Zuma. Both Baird and Esau have received global news coverage for their efforts, which are acclaimed as positive contributions to their community.

It is fortunate that sentimentality can be a respectable sort of attitude. Without it – that is, focusing solely on the scientific and academic value of languages – it is difficult to explain why it is better to preserve currently existing minority languages rather than revive long-dead languages that nobody living today cares about, or why it is better to support endangered natural languages such as the Lencan languages of Central America rather than artificial languages such as Volapük (constructed by a Roman Catholic priest in 19th-century Germany) and Klingon (the extra-terrestrial language in Star Trek), or why it is better to preserve endangered natural languages than to invent completely new languages.

Even people who are unsympathetic to efforts to support minority languages are, I imagine, less baffled by Esau’s desire to preserve N|uu than they would be by a campaign for the creation and proliferation of a completely new artificial language. No such campaign exists, of course, despite the fact that creating and promoting a new language would be scientifically interesting. The reason why it’s better to preserve currently existing natural languages than to create new ones is because of the historical and personal value of the former. These are exactly the sort of values associated with sentimentality.

Minority languages, then, are valuable. Does that mean that societies should invest in supporting them? Not necessarily. The value of minority languages might be outweighed by the value of not supporting them. Let’s look at two reasons why this might be the case: the burden that supporting minority languages places on people, and the benefits of reducing language diversity.

While we might value minority languages for similar reasons that we value medieval castles, there is an important difference in how we can go about preserving the two types of thing. Preserving a minority language places a greater burden on people than does preserving a castle. We can preserve a castle by paying people to maintain it. But we can’t preserve a minority language by paying people to carry out maintenance. Instead, we must get people to make the language a big part of their lives, which is necessary if they are to become competent speakers. Some people do this voluntarily, but if we want the language to grow beyond a pool of enthusiasts, we must impose lifestyle changes on people whether they like it or not. Often this involves legislation to ensure that children learn the minority language at school.

Such policies are controversial. Some parents think that it would be better for their children to learn a useful majority language rather than a less useful minority language. However, for native English speakers, the most commonly taught majority languages – French, German, Spanish, Italian – are not as useful as they first seem. A language is useful for a child to learn if it will increase the amount of people she can communicate with, increase the amount of places where she can make herself understood, and perhaps also if it is the language of a neighbouring country. Yet, because English is widely spoken in countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy, even an English-speaking monoglot can make himself understood pretty well when visiting these countries. If he decides to invest effort in learning one of these languages, he can expect relatively little return on his investment in terms of usefulness.

If people in English-speaking countries are concerned about teaching children useful languages, we should teach them languages whose native speakers less commonly understand English, such as Arabic and Mandarin – languages that are not commonly taught in schools in the UK and the US. There are, of course, some native English speakers who believe that learning any foreign language is pointless because English is so widely understood – think of the stereotypical British ex-pat living in Spain but not learning Spanish – but this view is clearly not held by parents who are supportive of their children learning some foreign language. So people who support English-speaking children learning French, German and Spanish, but who don’t support them learning a local minority language, will have difficulty defending their position in terms of usefulness. In that case, why is it so widely seen as a good thing for English-speaking children to learn majority languages such as French, German and Spanish? I think it is the same reason that many claim it’s a good thing to learn a minority language: to gain an insight into an unfamiliar culture, to be able to signal respect by speaking to people in the local language, to hone the cognitive skills one gains by learning a language, and so on.

There is also, I think, a special kind of enrichment that children – and people in general – get from learning a minority language connected to their community. They get a new insight into their community’s culture and history. They also gain the ability to participate in aspects of their culture that, without knowing the language, are closed off and even invisible; namely, events and opportunities conducted in the minority language. I write from experience here, having spent the past 18 months or so trying to learn Welsh. I was born and raised in Wales yet, until recently, my main contact with the language consisted mainly of ignoring it. Returning to Wales now, armed with my admittedly modest understanding of Welsh, I have a sense of this long-familiar country becoming visible to me in a new way. I feel pleased and interested when I encounter Welsh speakers. I am happy that my nephew learns Welsh at school. These strong conservative intuitions are – for a non-conservative like me – surprising and somewhat alien. But they are not unique: they centre on benefits that are frequently mentioned by campaigners for minority languages.

Finally, let’s consider a very different reason to resist the view that we should support minority languages. Language diversity is a barrier to successful communication. The Bible has a story about this: as a punishment for building the Tower of Babel, God ‘confused the language of all of the Earth’ by causing people to speak a multiplicity of languages where once they had all spoken the same one. It’s rare these days to encounter the view that our diversity of languages is a curse, but it’s notable that in other areas of communication – such as in the representation of numbers, length and volume – we favour standardisation. The advantages to adopting a single language are clear. It would enable us to travel anywhere in the world, confident that we could communicate with the people we met. We would save money on translation and interpretation. Scientific advances and other news could be shared faster and more thoroughly. By preserving a diversity of languages, we preserve the obstacles to communication. Wouldn’t it be better to allow as many languages as possible to die out, leaving us with just one universal lingua franca?

It would be difficult, however, to implement a lingua franca peacefully and justly. The very idea calls to mind oppressive past policies, such as the efforts of the Soviet Union to suppress local languages and to force all its citizens to communicate only in Russian. Extinct and endangered languages have not, on the whole, become extinct or endangered gently, by subsequent generations choosing freely to switch to a more dominant language. The history of language death is a violent one, as is reflected in the titles of books on the subject: David Crystal’s Language Death (2000), Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine’s Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (2000), and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas’s Linguistic Genocide in Education (2008).

It would, then, be difficult to embrace a lingua franca without harming speakers of other languages. In addition, if we were serious about acting justly, it would not be enough merely to abstain from harming communities of minority language speakers. Given the injustices that such communities have suffered in the past, it might be that they are owed compensation. This is a view commonly held by minority-language campaigners. It is debatable what form this compensation should take, but it seems clear that it should not include wiping out and replacing the local language.

Perhaps, if one were a god creating a world from scratch, it would be better to give the people in that world one language rather than many, like the pre-Babel civilisations described in the Bible. But now that we have a world with a rich diversity of languages, all of which are interwoven with distinct histories and cultures, and many of which have survived ill-treatment and ongoing persecution, yet which continue to be celebrated and defended by their communities and beyond – once we have all these things, there is no going back without sacrificing a great deal of what is important and valuable.

The death of languages. By Rebecca Roache. Aeon, October 12, 2017.