RP367 In Danger of Falling Silent

 RP367 In Danger of Falling Silent

There are over 6,000 languages spoken in the world today. More than 1,000 of them are locked away in the heads of elderly people who cannot pass them on to the next generation. If current rates of language extinction continue, anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of these languages will be gone forever by 2050. We are living in an age of mass language extinction.
To some, this isn't considered to be a problem. Quite the contrary, it's an indication of global progress. They argue that the fewer languages, the greater the number of people who can actually communicate with each other. Communication breeds understanding, so the world will be a more peaceful place as a result.
Others aren't so sure. Professor Wade Davis believes that a language takes a piece of humanity's heritage with it when it dies. To him, languages represent the complex web of human imagination. If one language gets plucked from that web, a way of thinking disappears along with it. In other words, the fewer languages there are in the world, the less imaginative and creative we are as a species.
It's going to take a lot of effort to rein in language extinction. The United Nation's list of dying languages is rather long. China's Thao language and Manchu made it onto the list. Saving these languages isn't just a matter of time and money. Governments need to foster the belief that these dying languages are worth saving.
The good news is that there have been success stories in the past. Hebrew was saved from the brink of extinction by the hard work of an academic named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the nineteenth century. He took an ancient language and transformed it into something that could be used in everyday life. Eventually, his efforts paid off as Hebrew is now spoken by over nine million people.
We should think of all the world's languages as humankind's cultural inheritance. They tell us stories about where we came from, the gods we believe in, what it is to be human, and the environment around us. We're squandering our inheritance, and when it's gone, it's gone forever.