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