The quiet death of languages

Somewhere in the world, by some estimates every few weeks, an elderly person dies who was the last fluent speaker of their language. There is rarely a news report, and no monument marks the occasion. Yet with that person, an entire way of describing the world quietly disappears. Of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken today, linguists estimate that around forty per cent are endangered, and many are on their last legs, with fewer than a thousand speakers left.

Contrary to popular belief, languages rarely die because they are "too simple" or "unable to cope" with modern life. Any language can expand its vocabulary to talk about computers or climate change, just as English borrowed thousands of words from French and Latin. Rather, languages die because their speakers stop passing them on. This usually happens gradually: parents who speak a minority language decide, often with the best of intentions, to raise their children in the dominant language of the country.

Their reasons are entirely understandable. In many countries, the majority language is the key to education, well-paid jobs and social respect, while the minority language is associated with poverty and rural life. Consequently, a single generation can break a chain of transmission that has lasted for centuries. Once children stop using the language at home, it tends to survive only among the elderly; in a family's rush to get ahead, it simply falls by the wayside.

Not everyone, it must be said, regards this as a tragedy. If a community chooses to switch to a more widely spoken language, the argument goes, why should outsiders object? Communication becomes easier, after all, and nobody is forcing anyone to abandon their heritage. There is a certain logic to this view, but it overlooks how much is lost along the way. Languages are not merely tools for exchanging information; they carry oral histories, detailed knowledge of local plants and animals, and ways of thinking that exist nowhere else.

Not all the news is bleak, however. Welsh, once in steep decline, is now taught in schools across Wales and heard daily on radio and television, while revival programmes in New Zealand and Hawaii have helped to bring Indigenous languages back into homes and classrooms. Hebrew, which had not been anyone's everyday mother tongue for many centuries, is now spoken by millions. These cases suggest that decline is not inevitable, provided that a community has both the will and the resources to turn the tide.

In the end, the fate of a language is decided not in parliaments but at kitchen tables, in playgrounds and, increasingly, on smartphones. Official recognition helps, but it cannot replace a grandmother telling stories to her grandchildren in her own words. As long as people value their language enough to use it in daily life, it has a future. Once they stop, bringing it back to life takes the kind of effort that few communities have managed.