Silent Plains … the Fading Sounds of Native Languages
Did you know that more than half of the languages spoken today come from 8 countries? I didn’t. This is an intriguing article well worth 5-10 minutes of your time, IMO.
There are interesting parallels to draw, up to a point, between linguistic and biological diversity. On a world map, their hotspots are distributed in roughly comparable ways, owing to the same causes and effects: the protection afforded by dense forests, habitat heterogeneity, forbidding mountain ranges, climate stability, the remoteness of ocean islands, etc. No wonder then that Papua New Guinea, which combines all these attributes, would emerge as the top location for both species (8% of world total) and linguistic richness, with 830 living tongues (12% of world total). No wonder either that in the high mountains of the Caucasus - another biodiversity hotspot - one finds on a territory no larger than the Iberian peninsula as many as five distinct linguistic families, compared to only three for the whole of Europe.
It is expected that by 2100 nearly half of today’s living tongues will have disappeared.But the similarities between biological and linguistic diversity end there, as other patterns have nothing in common. Every ten years, on average, two species of mammals go extinct (a high rate spun by global environmental degradation) compared to … 250 languages that vanish in the same time span. This is not trivial, and it reminds us that the life and death cycle of human tongues has more to do with the historical extension of agriculture, emergence of centralized states, colonialism, cultural imperialism, and global communication networks than with Darwinian evolution.Close to 7,000 distinct languages are still spoken today, more than half originating from just eight countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, China, Mexico, Cameroon, and Zaire. It is expected that by 2100 nearly half of today’s living tongues will have disappeared. If so, humanity will be considerably poorer. For each time a native language dies out, it is a distinct universe of mental constructs, with unique ecological wisdom acquired through millennia of direct contact with nature, which is lost. Gone is the refined Cheyenne technique of prairie management by fire in the dry mid-summers, almost gone the mysterious understanding of Namibian savanna animals by !Kung San hunters, and highly endangered the immense knowledge of the sea and its resources inherited by traditional fishing peoples from Oceania to the Arctic. […]
