Languages: Why we must save dying tongues (fwd link)

[Phil Cash Cash]

LAST PLACE ON EARTH| 6 June 2014

*Languages: Why we must save dying tongues*

 Rachel Nuwer

*Hundreds of our languages are teetering on the brink of extinction, and as
Rachel Nuwer discovers, we may lose more than just words if we allow them
to die out.*

Tom Belt, a native of Oklahoma, didn’t encounter the English language until
he began kindergarten. In his home, conversations took place in Cherokee.

Belt grew up riding horses, and after college bounced around the country
doing the rodeo circuit. Eventually, he wound up in North Carolina in
pursuit of a woman he met at school 20 years earlier. “All those years ago,
she said the thing that attracted her to me was that I was the youngest
Cherokee she’d ever met who could speak Cherokee,” he says. “I bought a
roundtrip ticket to visit her, but I never used the other end of the
ticket.”

The couple married. Yet his wife – also Cherokee – did not speak the
language. He soon realised that he was a minority among his own people. At
that time, just 400 or so Cherokee speakers were left in the Eastern Band,
the tribe located in the Cherokee's historic homeland and the one that his
wife belongs to. Children were no longer learning the language either. “I
began to realise the urgency of the situation,” Belt says. So he decided to
do something about it.

Cherokee is far from the only minority language threatened with demise.
Over the past century alone, around 400 languages – about one every three
months – have gone extinct, and most linguists estimate that 50% of the
world’s remaining 6,500 languages will be gone by the end of this century
(some put that figure as high as 90%, however). Today, the top ten
languages in the world claim around half of the world’s population. Can
language diversity be preserved, or are we on a path to becoming a
monolingual species?

​Access full article below:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages​
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