The Risk of Decline in World Languages

There are an astonishing 7000 languages spoken throughout the world. Clearly there are some that dominate but the vast majority are smaller languages spoken by an ever decreasing amount of people.

In fact, half of the world’s languages are in danger of disappearing for good. Is this a cause for concern? Linguist K. David Harrison certainly thinks so, believing that we have much to learn from these dying languages “Nearly half of the world's languages are endangered and may vanish in this century. The loss to science, to humanity and to the native communities themselves will be catastrophic.”

The urgency with which something needs to be done to preserve this heritage was highlighted recently by the death of the last speaker of a language spoken on India’s Andaman Islands. Often it can be curious as to why these languages do die out, as the last of the native speakers are usually keen to pass on their knowledge. Lack of interest, time or finance perhaps?

On the other hand, some argue that many languages are not intrinsically unique but simply variations on an existing language. This can be demonstrated by looking at the simple differences between, say, British English and American English. George Bernard Shaw’s assertion that they are “two nations divided by a common language” goes someway in signifying that although two languages may be similar and based on the same structure they can be different in themselves. Even today there are some words between the two that an American would not understand about British English, and vice versa.

Perhaps the best argument for preserving a dwindling language comes from the words inherent in that language that tell us something about the culture and heritage of its peoples. It may be that in areas where a small language is spoken there is flora and fauna unfamiliar to an outsider, possibly the natives there will have unique words for some of these plants or animals. A great deal about these may yet to be known, and perhaps we may lose an element of this knowledge by not being able to understand either the name of it or a descriptive term.

We must ensure that we do not let the constant progression of globalisation remove anything from the pool of knowledge that could yet to be gleamed.