Languages: Why we must save dying tongues

Languages: Why we must save dying tongues
Rachel Nuwer for BBC News - Future
June 6, 2014

Hundreds of our languages are teetering on the brink of extinction, and as Rachel Nuwer discovers, we may lose more than just words if we allow them to die out.

Tom Belt, a native of Oklahoma, didn’t encounter the English language until he began kindergarten. In his home, conversations took place in Cherokee.

Belt grew up riding horses, and after college bounced around the country doing the rodeo circuit. Eventually, he wound up in North Carolina in pursuit of a woman he met at school 20 years earlier. “All those years ago, she said the thing that attracted her to me was that I was the youngest Cherokee she’d ever met who could speak Cherokee,” he says. “I bought a roundtrip ticket to visit her, but I never used the other end of the ticket.”

The couple married. Yet his wife – also Cherokee – did not speak the language. He soon realised that he was a minority among his own people. At that time, just 400 or so Cherokee speakers were left in the Eastern Band, the tribe located in the Cherokee's historic homeland and the one that his wife belongs to. Children were no longer learning the language either. “I began to realise the urgency of the situation,” Belt says. So he decided to do something about it.

Cherokee is far from the only minority language threatened with demise. Over the past century alone, around 400 languages – about one every three months – have gone extinct, and most linguists estimate that 50% of the world’s remaining 6,500 languages will be gone by the end of this century (some put that figure as high as 90%, however). Today, the top ten languages in the world claim around half of the world’s population. Can language diversity be preserved, or are we on a path to becoming a monolingual species?

MORE at http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages