The last speakers of probably half of the world's languages are alive today. As they grow old and... more The last speakers of probably half of the world's languages are alive today. As they grow old and die, their voices will fall silent. Their children and grandchildren -by overwhelming majority -will either choose not to learn or will be deprived of the opportunity to learn the ancestral languages. Most of the world's languages have never been written down anywhere or scientifically described. We do not even know what exactly we stand to lose -for science, for humanity, for posterity -when languages die. An immense edifice of human knowledge, painstakingly assembled over millennia by countless minds is eroding, vanishing into oblivion.
The last speakers of probably half of the world's languages are alive today. As they grow old and... more The last speakers of probably half of the world's languages are alive today. As they grow old and die, their voices will fall silent. Their children and grandchildren -by overwhelming majority -will either choose not to learn or will be deprived of the opportunity to learn the ancestral languages. Most of the world's languages have never been written down anywhere or scientifically described. We do not even know what exactly we stand to lose -for science, for humanity, for posterity -when languages die. An immense edifice of human knowledge, painstakingly assembled over millennia by countless minds is eroding, vanishing into oblivion.
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