The last speaker

A language is declared extinct when its last fluent speaker dies. Linguists estimate that this happens somewhere in the world roughly every few weeks, and that a substantial fraction of the seven thousand languages now spoken will not survive the century.

The common response is to ask what is actually lost, and it deserves a serious answer rather than sentiment. Part of what disappears is knowledge encoded in vocabulary: distinctions that a community found worth naming because they mattered for living in a particular place. Languages of coastal communities often carry fine-grained terms for sea states and fish behaviour that have no single-word equivalent elsewhere, developed over generations of people whose survival depended on the distinction. When the language goes, that knowledge usually goes with it, because it was never written down in any language, including the dominant one replacing it.

Part of what is lost is harder to justify in practical terms. Each language is one solution to the problem of encoding thought in sound, and the range of solutions turns out to be wider than anyone expected. Some languages mark whether you witnessed an event yourself or heard about it, as obligatorily as English marks past tense. Studying such systems has repeatedly overturned confident claims about what human language must do.

It is also worth saying plainly what language death usually is. It is rarely a free choice. It is the result of a generation concluding, correctly, that their children will be punished at school and disadvantaged at work for speaking the language of their grandparents. The shift is a rational response to pressure, which is exactly why describing it as natural is misleading.