Language and Communication

1There are currently somewhere between six and seven thousand languages spoken on Earth. By the end of this century, linguists estimate, roughly half of them will have fallen silent. A language does not die all at once. It loses speakers, one by one, as the old grow older and the young move toward languages that seem more useful, more connected, more likely to earn them a living. At some point the last speaker dies, and with them goes a way of naming the world that no other language contains.

2Language is not a neutral vessel for carrying information from one person to another. It shapes what we notice, what we remember, what we are able to think. The Yagua people of Peru use a complex system of grammatical markers to indicate when something happened: not just past, present and future, but distinctions between things witnessed directly, things learned through hearsay and things inferred from evidence. English, which manages with three tenses, cannot replicate these distinctions. Speakers of Yagua are not more intelligent than speakers of English. They are differently equipped.

3The global spread of English is a phenomenon without precedent in linguistic history. No other language has achieved this degree of reach this rapidly. It functions now as the language of international business, scientific publication, aviation and digital communication. A researcher in Istanbul communicates with a counterpart in Tokyo not in Turkish or Japanese but in English, a language that neither of them grew up with. For practical purposes this is enormously convenient. It is also, in ways that take longer to articulate, a loss.

4What is lost when a language dies is not just vocabulary. It is a set of lenses through which a community has looked at the world for centuries. The structure of a sentence reflects a way of understanding time, causation, relationship and identity. When the Siletz Dee-ni language of Oregon passed, in 2023, from two living speakers to one, the world became very slightly less capable of thinking about itself in all the ways it had once been able to. This is a loss that is almost impossible to grieve, because it is almost impossible to perceive.

5The last fluent speaker of the Dalmatian language died in 1898. He was an old man on an island, and when he went the language went with him. Nobody wrote down much. We know approximately what Dalmatian sounded like and almost nothing about what it felt like to think in it. That gap is permanent. We will not cross it. What we can choose is how many gaps of that kind we are willing to make.