A staggering 44% of human languages are endangered, with culture, tradition, and entire ways of understanding the world at stake. The story of the Ubykh language illustrates this crisis. In the 1800s, tens of thousands spoke it on the Black Sea coast. After Russia conquered the region, the Ubykhs were forced into exile in the Ottoman Empire. Transported thousands of miles by a traumatized community now scattered across Turkey, Ubykh survived until 1992 when its last fluent speaker died. It was one of at least 244 languages that have become extinct since 1950, and soon, unless anything changes, many more will follow.
The Scale of Language Loss
Over the next 40 years, language loss is predicted to triple without intervention. Yet we hear about language endangerment far less often than other losses to our planet's diversity. Deforestation in Costa Rica is being reversed following the realization of the natural and scientific resource that may disappear with its trees. International archaeologists rallied to preserve ancient remains in Syria after destruction by Islamic State. But efforts to document or preserve minority languages are rarely celebrated.
Databases such as Ethnologue chart unfathomable cultural riches within more than 7,000 known living languages. But 44% of these are now classed as endangered, many with fewer than 1,000 speakers left. One-nation-one-language narratives lull us into assuming France speaks French, China speaks Mandarin, ignoring tens and even hundreds of regional languages, whose speakers have experienced persecution, bans in school, or stigmatization for speaking their mother tongue.
Communities Fighting Back
Some communities have political or cultural autonomy to protect their languages – think of Welsh or Māori – but many are not so fortunate. Some rue and rally; others resign themselves to decline, not because they choose to abandon a language, but because maintaining it against a dominant one takes huge resolve and resources.
Linguists are often on the frontlines. Georges Dumézil doggedly sought out Ubykh, a rumoured Caucasian language with an incredible number of distinct sounds. Decades of search led him to Tevfik Esenç, raised by Ubykh-speaking grandparents. Their partnership revealed Ubykh has more than 80 consonants and just three vowels, a ratio at the edge of language evolution – an important addition to our understanding of human communication.
The Value of Endangered Languages
The study of endangered languages often reveals that Indigenous peoples identified and classified flora and fauna long before western science. Many have extensive vocabularies connected to traditional practices equally at risk. Linguists have arrived just in time to record these, interviewing elders before they pass away.
Documenting languages is important because it means communities can better revive them if they choose to. In my work investigating linguicide – the deliberate erasure of a language – it is clear that linguistic and human rights often go hand in hand. The displacement and disempowerment of Indigenous people across the United States unfolded alongside the loss of a dizzying variety of languages. Attempts by communities to reclaim their heritage often focus on language revival.
Why Language Matters for Wellbeing
In Canada, research showed that among groups where more than half could maintain a conversation in their native language, youth suicide rates were low to absent, whereas they were six times higher in groups where that wasn't the case. A language alone does not save a community from poor mental health, but it may indicate cultural resilience. In 2012, a government inquiry in Australia found that Indigenous languages played such an important role in communities' health and life expectancy that they should be recognized in the constitution. Some 14 years later, the constitution still only recognises English. In Europe, the Charter for Regional or Minority Languages promises better protection, although many countries have not ratified it, including France and Italy.
The Homogenisation Threat
All this is against a backdrop of homogenisation – with major languages such as English, Mandarin, and Spanish dominating (88% of the world's population is a native speaker of one of only 20 languages). Linguists have observed that migrants tend to become monolingual in their adopted country's language by the third generation.
I have seen this first-hand. I grew up only understanding, not speaking, the glorious soundscape of standard Italian and 'dialët' from the mountains of Piacenza that my Nonna and Mum spoke. It had been so devalued in Italian public life that it was called a dialect. It is actually a variety of Emilian called Piaśintein, a descendant of vulgar Latin. Transmission to children has basically stopped, so it can feel like an artefact from the past. Yet following my Nonna's death, weaving it into conversation with my Mum is a way of keeping a part of her alive.
But not just her – the unique time, place, and culture it represents; the fronted vowel sound ø, which can sound more Scandinavian than Italian; the nature words, especially those for i funz, the valley's famous mushrooms. And much else besides.
Hope for Revival
From Ubykh to Piaśintein, language documentation holds out hope for revival. For others – Australia's Walangama, Argentina's Abipón – the little that survives may never be enough. Who can say what we have lost in their now disappeared inventories of words for plants or animals, or in their wise sayings? As we speak, there are activists demanding legal and cultural recognition for thousands of endangered languages. We should listen to them before it is too late.
Sophia Smith Galer is a journalist and author of 'How to Kill a Language' (William Collins).
