Language extinction rate

Languages are part of the human database of knowledge and tell us about or cultures and thinking processes. With the extinction of a language, a part of collective human knowledge is lost forever. It is on par with a museum full of ancient treasures being destroyed. National Geographic is studying this problem.

“Languages are undergoing a global extinction crisis that greatly exceeds the pace of species extinction,” linguistics professor David Harrison told the National Geographic website .
Harrison said half of the world’s 7,000 languages were expected to disappear before the end of the century.
He said indigenous people had an intimate knowledge of their environment that was lost when their language disappeared, along with concepts dealing with mathematics and the nature of time often unfamiliar to western thinking.
“Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it’s only in people’s heads,” he said. “We are seeing in front of our eyes the erosion of the human knowledge base.”.

There are many places to read about language extinction.  I have thought about creating programs myself to help preserve languages that might be extinct.

Tags: extinction, language, language-extinction, languages, National-Geographic