Across the globe, there is a silent disaster taking place, not with the rubble of decaying ecosystems but with the fading breath of the last speakers of extinct languages. It is the quiet elimination of oral languages, an elimination that is also wiping out not just words, but whole worlds of human knowledge, culture, and identity. When a language dies, it isn't merely a succession of sounds being lost; it is a way of looking and being in the world that is lost to us. Unlike when an animal species dies and there are bones and fossils left, the death of a language only leaves silence, with it millennia of wisdom, tales, and songs, and leaves human beings profoundly impoverished.
An oral language is more than just a communicative tool. It's an alive repository, a map of genetics for the culture, in which lies the history, the values, and survival strategies of the people. For those without writing, all that they know—all that their world is about, their medicine, their rituals, their past—is in the language. The vocabulary of a language is a map of what its speakers value. Inuit languages, for instance, have several different words for different types of snow—wet snow, drifting snow, packed snow—each corresponding to a condition of special importance about traveling and staying alive. The people of the Amazon know highly developed information on local flora and habitats, designations, and uses for dozens of plants unknown to Western science. This living tradition, handed down from one generation to the next, is a vast, unexploited reservoir of human strength. When the last speaker of such a language has died, this entire library goes up in smoke. Therapeutic remedies for disease, methods of natural agriculture, and profound philosophical understanding of man's place in the universe may be lost to a generation.
The forces working toward linguistic loss are powerful and interconnected. The toughest is the pressure of globalization and economic necessity to communicate in a leading language. English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi are entry points to education, employment, and participation in the global economy. Parents who wish the best for their kids simply abandon the use of their mother tongue at home, thinking that competence in a leading language is the key to a good future. This is not a frivolous choice, but one of economic realities and need, and of a desire for opportunity. Furthermore, decades of official language policies and tragic history have been harmful. Most governments and most countries' policies, the United States, Canada, and Australia among them, actively suppressed indigenous languages. Children were removed from their parents and put in boarding schools, and punished for speaking their native language. This brutal process of assimilation instilled intense shame for the native languages and severed the intergenerational transmission chain. The grandparents could still speak the language, but their generation, whom they could have spoken to, were instructed to be ashamed of it.
The dying of language is a three-generation, step-by-step fall into silence. Generation one uses the ancient language only. Generation two is bilingual, home language as but dominant language at school and in the workplace. Generation three is monolingual again, but in the dominant language. They may be able to comprehend their grandparents but not reply to them. They are the "semi-speakers," in two worlds but neither their own. And then the grandparents die, and the language dies with them. No climactic struggle, no dramatic high point. The language simply drifts out of use, its last utterances on a nursing home bed or in some remote village, by someone who has no idea of its value. That is why it is a silent extinction; it happens without anyone realizing it, unseen by the world.
It is felt deeply at a human level. Culture has its foundation in language. Language is the conduit for ceremony, prayer, humor, and story. The stories that form a people—their creation narrative, their moral fables, their histories of removal and survival—are made meaningless when translated. Humor makes jokes not funny, songs without beat, and poetry without breath. The specific concepts that are within a language are rendered untranslatable. There could be a word for the type of loneliness when you are not at home, or the happiness derived when your family members sit together, which cannot be expressed using any other language. When the language is extinct, that specific emotional thought is lost to human life. Individuals who lose their heritage language have a sudden sense of loss and displacement, feeling that they are cut off from their heritage and from society. But that is not all.
Around the world, there is a move to restore forgotten languages that is led by passionate communities who will not see their heritage lost forever. It is painstaking and heart-wrenching work that is traditionally reliant on older generations and precious but frequently partial documents. Linguists are collaborators, using advanced technology to accomplish the task. They capture high-fidelity sound and vision of past speakers, preserving their voices for eternity. They produce painstaking dictionaries and grammar handbooks. But the real work is done by the community itself. They build "language nests" immersion pre-schools where children are educated by only native-speaking elders, giving rise to a new generation of native speakers. They develop apps and online databases to place learning content at the end of people's fingers. They organize community activities in which only the native language is used, painstakingly recreating an environment in which the language can live and breathe anew. These are efforts of more than saving words; they are efforts of healing.
They are a gesture of cultural resistance and self-definition. To people who have been suppressed for so long, the reshaping of a language is a strong statement of identity and sovereignty. It is a way whereby grandparents can be reconnected with grandchildren, and people with their past. It is a declaration that their dream is still worth fighting for and deserving of survival. Every child who learns a single word of his or her ancient language is a victory over the silence. The extinction of ancient oral languages is a global crisis, but it is not unavoidable.
The fate of these treasures of language depends on a shift in attitude. The world needs to understand that linguistic diversity is as much of a concern as biological diversity. A world where only a few among the world's languages are being spoken is a monoculture of the mind, a less imaginative, less vigorous, and less rich world. Each language is one specific key to human experience. Their loss is a loss to all of mankind, an erasure of a distinct color from our group photo. Keeping up efforts to document, restore, and keep such languages going is an expense on our shared human patrimony. It is a guarantee that the past's lessons are a living voice today and, in the future, a legacy to be handed on. The silence does not necessarily need to last forever.