For your amusement: This earth used to be inhabited by dinosaurs. Then, a big rock came falling from the sky. “Oh no!” said the dinosaurs. And so they went extinct. Just like the languages.
For real: Linguist K. David Harrison talks about the death of a language in his interview. He mentions how a language goes extinct usually when there is no person/community left that speaks the language. This can result in a loss of a lot of valuable knowledge and culture which was only known to the speakers of the language.
To paraphrase K. David Harrison's words from the interview, most people believe that if something exists, then science knows about it, but how this is actually not true. There are many indigenous communities that closely interact with the nature around them and know a lot more about the animals and plants than science does because they are an integral part of the community’s everyday life. So, when the language of an indigenous community goes extinct, so do their classifications of the nature around them, and this results in a lot of undiscovered knowledge that only remained undiscovered because no one dived deeper into the language and the community. This is only one aspect of how the death of a language could have a negative effect on the entirety of humankind.
However, a dead language can definitely be brought back to life. Consider Hebrew for example, it was a dead language for about a century and people still managed to revive it. More and more people are understanding the importance of preserving languages, and a lot of institutions are dedicating their resources to documenting indigenous languages. For example the SOAS University of London has an Endangered Language Documentation Programme whose key focus is on trying to delve deeper into and helping document endangered languages and make them freely available to everyone.
Comments