Why do languages die? | The Economist

There are more than 7,000 languages. The number of people speaking English, Spanish and Mandarin continues to grow, but every fortnight a langauge will disappear forever. The Economist's language expert Lane Greene explains why.

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♪ (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) ♪