♪ (classical music) ♪
Irankarapte.
♪ (classical music) ♪
Iishu.
♪ (classical music) ♪
Dydh da.
♪ (classical music) ♪
I don't speak those languages.
In fact, very few people do.
They're used only by a handful of people,
and all those languages
are in danger of extinction.
There are more than 7,000 languages
spoken in the world today,
but about a third of those
have fewer than 1,000 speakers,
and according to UNESCO,
more than 40% of those languages
are in danger of extinction.
In fact, every fortnight,
one of the world's languages
disappears forever.
When you say dead language,
many people think of Latin.
But Latin actually never died.
It's been spoken continuously
since the time of the Caesars,
but it changed very gradually
over 2,000 years
until it became French, Spanish,
and other Romance languages.
True language death happens
when communities switched
to other languages,
and parents stopped raising their children
to speak their old one.
When the last elderly speaker dies,
the language is unlikely
ever to be spoken fluently again.
If you look at this chart,
which measures the world's languages
in terms of their size
and their state of health,
you can see that most languages
are ranked in the middle.
English, like just a few other
dominant languages,
is up at the top left-hand corner.
It's in a really strong state.
But if your language is down here
in the bottom right-hand
corner of the graph,
like Kayapulau from Indonesia
or Kuruaya from Brazil,
you are in serious trouble.
In the bad old days,
governments just banned
languages they didn't like.
But sometimes the pressure is more subtle.
(tank firing sound)
Any teenager growing up
in the Soviet Union
soon realized that whatever language
you spoke at home,
mastering Russian was going to be
the key to success.
Citizens in China, including Tibetans,
as well as speakers
of Shanghainese or Cantonese
face similar pressure today
to focus on Mandarin.
♪ (classical music) ♪
Once a language is gone,
well, it usually goes the way of the dodo.
(dodo squawking)
Just one language has ever
come back from the dead:
Hebrew.
It was extinct for two millennia,
but Jewish settlers to Palestine
in the early 20th centuries
spoke different languages back in Europe,
and they adopted Hebrew on their arrival
as their common language.
It became Israel's official language
when the country
was fully established in 1948,
and now has 7 million speakers.
Now, Hebrew is the world's
only fully revived language
but others are trying.
Cornish, spoken in southwestern England,
died out two centuries ago.
But today there are several hundred
speakers of the revived language.
(cow mooing)
Practicality aside, human diversity
is a good thing in its own right.
Imagine going on an exciting holiday
only to find that the food,
clothing, buildings, the people,
and yes, the language,
was just the same as back home.
Oliver Wendell Holmes put it well:
"Every language is a temple
in which the soul of those who speak
it is enshrined."
Moving that soul of the people
from a temple into a museum
just isn't the same thing.
♪ (classical music) ♪