The launches a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record a disappearing Greek dialect has this week drawn attention back to one of the great extinctions of the modern world: nine languages are believed to disappear every year. Spoken by an aging population of a few thousand people in the mountain villages near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, Romeyka diverged from modern Greek thousands of years ago. It has no written form.
For linguists, it is a “living bridge” to the ancient Hellenic world, the loss of which would clearly be a blow. But some languages are in even greater trouble, with 350 having fewer than 50 native speakers and 46 having just one. A collaboration between Australian and British institutions paints the situation in stark colours, with a language stripes graph, designed to illustrate the accelerating decline in each decade between 1700 and today. Its authors predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s 7,000 languages will become extinct by 2150. Even now, half the people on the planet only speak 24 of it.
The United Nations is so concerned that it is a International Decade of Indigenous Languages. In this doomsday scenario, the kind of easy-to-use recording technology used by Crowdsourcing Romeyka is a game changer, not least because there may be pockets of Romeyka speakers around the world.
The history of languages has always been linked to colonialism and political persecution, which both disperse and oppress populations. The paradoxical role of large cities in the survival of even the smallest of them is revealed by the Endangered Languages Alliance (ELA), which has located and mapped hundreds of languages in New York. Among the more startling revelations is that of 700 surviving speakers of Seke, which originated in a group of mountain villages in Nepal, more than 150 can be traced to two apartment buildings in Brooklyn.
It is one thing to record and archive endangered languages, but even among linguists themselves there is a debate about whether they should be preserved at all costs. On one side was Ken Hale, an activist who famously argued that losing any language was “like dropping a bomb on the Louvre”. On the other hand, the Cambridge professor behind the Romeyka project, Ioanna Sitaridou, who believes that it is up to speakers to decide whether they want to pass on their tongue.
But social and economic priorities change, and it is not unknown for minority languages to skip a generation. One such is Manx, which was downgraded from extinct to critically endangered by Unesco after school children got in touch and asked: “If our language is extinct, which language do we write in?” A strategy is now in place to double the number of Manx speakers on the Isle of Man in a decade.
In a time of catastrophic environmental change, there are pragmatic reasons to listen to the wisdom of language communities that may be vanishingly small on their own, but which together speak more than half of the world’s surviving languages. Of Sami reindeer herders across the Arctic to Australia’s indigenous peoples, the ways people express themselves encode ancient ways of living in nature. Both a will and a way are needed if they are to survive. By simply honoring their existence, linguists play an important role.
