Languages go extinct as the global communication being taken over by the major languages such as Spanish, Mandarin and English. Lots of tribal languages go extinct because of the loss of native population or standardized education in other languages. Linguists estimate that half of the 7000 languages could go extinct this century. Linguist David Harrison said that people don’t know what they are losing when a language dies. There are invisible property embedded in a language. When a language dies, we also lose their way of looking at the world. There are many plants and animals have not been scientifically defined or discovered, but we could find names for them in many different tribal languages.
Linguists can help preserve a language by documenting the language and keep a record of it through talking to the last speakers. They would record audio entries and create a dictionary for that language. Sometimes linguists could face challenges as most of the native speakers are elderly, and recording them need the speaker’s consent and focus. A “dead” language can be brought to life. Linguists would work on existing records and language associated with the “dead” language to learn about it. They would also try to generate a population of active speakers again for the “dead” language.
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