Right now, someplace on Earth, the last speaker of an ancient language is breathing his or her last breaths. When this person passes away, another language will be gone.
Ever heard of Jiwarli? No? I'm not surprised: The last native speaker died in Australia in 1976.
Chinook used to function as the language of trade in the Pacific Northwest, because so many of the region's Native American tribes spoke it as a second language. Now, not even the Chinook speak Chinook.
In California, at least 50 Native American languages are "endangered." The estimated number of Shasta speakers, for example, is down to zero.
Languages are blinking out at a breakneck pace these days. Roughly 6,000 languages are spoken in the world today; half of them will vanish in this century, and 90 percent will be gone by the next. The Great Extinction, some linguists call it.
Whoa! Sounds bad, huh?
Not to everyone. John Miller, writing in the Wall Street Journal, asserts that every time a language dies, it's time to celebrate because it means another "primitive" tribe has joined the modern world.
Although Miller fails to mention what's so great about the modern world, he does have a point. Terms like "extinction" and "endangered" put the disappearance of languages on the same footing as the disappearance of species. But there is a huge difference.
One world, one language
A single species cannot survive on its own; the thinning-down of species signals a threat to life on Earth itself. A single language, however, can do just fine. Calling the disappearance of languages "extinction" sneaks in the presumption that the process should be halted. Let's not accept that premise without examination.
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