The launch of a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record a vanishing Greek dialect drew attention back this week to one of the great extinctions of the modern world: nine languages are believed to be disappearing every year. Romeyka, which is spoken by an ageing population of a few thousand people in the mountain villages near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, diverged from modern Greek thousands of years ago. It has no written form.
For linguists, it is a “living bridge” to the ancient Hellenic world, the loss of which would clearly be a blow. But some languages are in even bigger trouble, with 350 that have fewer than 50 native speakers and 46 that have just one. A collaboration between Australian and British institutions paints the situation in stark colours, with a language stripes chart, devised to illustrate the accelerating decline in each decade between 1700 and today. Its authors predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s 7,000 languages will be extinct by 2150. Even now, half of the people on the planet speak just 24 of them.
The United Nations is so concerned that it has declared an International Decade of Indigenous Languages. In this doomsday scenario, the sort of easy-to-use recording technology employed by Crowdsourcing Romeyka is a gamechanger, not least because there may turn out to be pockets of Romeyka speakers around the world.
The history of languages has always been linked to colonialism and political persecution, which scatter populations as well as suppressing them. The paradoxical role of big cities in the survival of even the smallest of them is revealed by the Endangered Languages Alliance (ELA), which has tracked down and mapped hundreds of languages in New York. Among its more startling revelations is that, of 700 surviving speakers of Seke, which originated in a cluster of mountain villages in Nepal, more than 150 can be traced to two apartment buildings in Brooklyn.
It is one thing to record and archive endangered languages but, even among linguists themselves, there is a debate about whether they should be preserved at all costs. On the one side was Ken Hale, an activist who famously argued that losing any language was “like dropping a bomb on the Louvre”. On the other is the Cambridge professor behind the Romeyka project, Ioanna Sitaridou, who believes that it is up to speakers to decide whether to pass on their tongue.
But social and economic priorities change, and it is not unknown for minority languages to skip a generation. One such is Manx, which was downgraded from extinct to critically endangered by Unesco after schoolchildren got in touch, asking: “If our language is extinct then what language are we writing in?” A strategy is now in place to double the number of Manx speakers on the Isle of Man in a decade.
At a time of catastrophic environmental change, there are pragmatic reasons for listening in to the wisdom of linguistic communities that might be vanishingly small on their own, but which together speak more than half of the world’s surviving languages. From Sami reindeer herders across the Arctic to Australia’s Indigenous peoples, the ways in which people express themselves encode ancient ways of living in nature. Both a will and a way are needed if they are to survive. By simply honouring their existence, linguists play an important role.
