Why do languages die?

24 November 2005

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Unh, this isn't a happy subject. For those of us who love languages, it's terrible to see that they're dying at a very rapid rate. About half the world's languages have fewer than 10,000 speakers -- about enough to fill a small-town football stadium.

Even worse is that most of the world's languages -- some think it's close to 90% -- may be lost by the end of this century. There are some languages for which there are only a handful of speakers left in the world; some have only one or two. And when they die, the language dies too.

Why do languages disappear? Well, let's look at some examples. In the mountains of India we can find - if we hurry - the Sulung people, now down to only a few thousand, who've been driven to a remote area by constant warfare with neighbouring tribes. If they're wiped out by their enemies, their language will vanish. Wars destroy more than people.

You might ask: can there be any new peoples and languages left to discover? Surprisingly, yes. A few have recently come to light when previously uncontacted people were found in isolated places. In 1991, for instance, an ancient language known as Gongduk was discovered in the Himalayas which, for linguists, was like finding the fabled lost valley of Shangri-La. And in the deep Brazilian interior, there are still languages being discovered, some of them unrelated to any other known tongue. But stories like that are rare. The overwhelming trend…is in the direction of extinction.

For the most part, high mountains, steep valleys, lack of infrastructure or roads -- afford little protection, not even in the far corners of the earth. Think about the speakers of Rapanui, on Easter Island in the Pacific. After centuries of separation from the world, they were taken from their island as slaves to collect guano from the coast of South America. Very few came back and today there are just a few thousand who have kept Rapanui alive in the face of Spanish, imported from Chile.

Thirty years ago in Brazil the Jiahui people were driven out of their traditional lands -- into the hands of hostile neighbours -- by ranchers and illegal timber cutters. The few that were left joined a less hostile group or drifted to the cities. Now they've reclaimed some of their lands, but how many Jiahui are left? Just fifty.

Or what about the Rikbatsá people in Brazil's Mato Grosso state? They were great warriors, but they couldn't fight epidemics of influenza and smallpox that were brought by Jesuit missionaries. Diseases imported from Europe decimated them and dozens of other native peoples of the Americas -- and with them their native tongues.

And if human invasions aren't bad enough, nature itself can swallow up languages. In 1998 a terrible tsunami struck the north coast of Papua New Guinea, and killed nearly all the speakers of the Warapu and Sissano languages. Just a few who weren't home at the time are the only ones left to keep the languages alive.

Finally, so-called "killer languages" -- like English or Spanish -- are so dominant that people may voluntarily give up their mother tongue -- for convenience or economic reasons. Indigenous peoples sometimes abandon their language to overcome discrimination, or fit into a majority culture. As children stop learning them, the languages slowly wither away.

Why should we care? Because, with the loss of a language comes the loss of inherited knowledge, an entire thought-world. I've often heard it compared to losing a natural resource or an animal species. Yes, we can reconstruct a few extinct languages, and linguists do that; but in the end what we have then is not much more than words on paper. We can't bring back from the dead a society that spoke the language, or the heritage and culture behind it. Once a language is gone, it's gone forever.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Christopher Moseley of the BBC in London. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about languages, visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.