Thousands of languages threatened with extinction in war of the words

Ninety-year-old Edna Guerrero was the world’s last speaker of Northern Pomo Indian. Three weeks ago she died - reducing the planet’s complement of languages by one.

It is a sad tale, although, not a tragic one. Humanity does possess another 6,000 forms of speech. But Edna Guerrero’s story is being repeated thousands of time across the globe.

T he world is heading towards a universal language, and that is ENGLISH. Half the planet’s languages are no longer being learnt by the children of native speakers. These different forms of speech cannot therefore be said to be endangered. They have passed that stage. They are about to be wiped out.

California is home to 50 of America’s 250 native languages. Not one of these tongues is now being learnt by children, and most are only spoken by people more than 70 years old. Hopa, Mojave, Washo and other languages are about to join the Pomo of Edna Guerrero.

Only those languages currently spoken by several hundred thousand people or more are likely to survive in the next century. At the very most, we will have only about 300 languages being spoken in a hundred or so years. We face losing 95 per cent of our different forms of speech.

Language loss has serious scientific implications. The potential use of healing plants and herbs known only to native tribes, such as those in the Amazon forests, is being jeopardized because they are being stripped of the vocabulary to describe such flora.

Worse is the impact on attempts to understand how humans think. In many Australian aboriginal tongues, complex relationships between objects have been worked out by natives and are of great intellectual importance.

Different people have different ways of diving up space and time, and various ways we speak open a window on the rich diversity of our thoughts. If you lose a language, you lose the tradition and culture embedded in it.

The process of attrition was begun by Western colonisers who enrolled local children into their schools and punished those who tried to speak their native tongues. Recently, simple economics has caused extinction. People want to speak some prestigious languages because they are associated with affluence.

Once language variety is lost, it will take many thousands of years to restore it.