A Language Dies Every 40 Days
The next victim of global warming could be ... our languages! There are some 3,500 languages that are in danger of disappearing by 2100. This is due to colonisation, globalisation and global warming. Every time an indigenous language vanishes, a unique fund of history, knowledge and culture is lost as well.
The number of unique languages spoken worldwide is steadily declining, according to figures from the U.S. Language Conservancy. Nine languages cease to be spoken every year. In other words, a language dies every forty days. UNESCO predicts that if this problem is not addressed, half of our 7,000 languages are at risk of vanishing by the end of this century. Those that could become extinct include many of the indigenous languages spoken in North America, South America and Australia.
Climate change
Indigenous languages are disappearing because in many cases they are not recognised by the government or there is no education available in those languages. The climate crisis is also a contributing factor: many smaller language communities live in areas threatened by rising sea levels, floods, heat or drought. They are forced to migrate, causing their language community to be scattered. In many cases, this fragmentation and contact with other more "dominant" languages deals the death-blow to a minority language that was already struggling.
Losses
Researchers warn that not only languages will be lost, but grammatical diversity will disappear as well. Grammar refers to the agreed rules people have for forming words and sentences in a particular language. These linguistic rules vary from place to place and they often change over time. When languages die out - along with their grammar - this has major consequences. Every time an indigenous language vanishes, a unique fund of human history, knowledge and culture disappears as well.
A decade of indigenous languages
To slow down the loss of our linguistic knowledge, an international research team has created the "Grambank" database for languages and their grammar. It already contains more than 2,400 languages, but there are plans to expand it further. The United Nations also recognises the importance of linguistic diversity and the preservation of indigenous languages. The organisation has therefore declared the period from 2022 to 2032 as the Decade of Indigenous Languages. Who knows, perhaps it will allow us to save all those precious "small" languages.
