When a species goes extinct, sometimes fossils can be found, remains uncovered. The presence of DNA might allow scientists to decipher the biological essence. We know the Stegosaurus. We can study the Wooly Mammoth.
But when a human language disappears, especially one spoken by indigenous tribal people, there’s rarely any key left behind. For most of the world’s 6,000 languages, writing samples are sparse, recordings rare. One by one, they’re going silent. Each loss becomes a linguistic black hole, where an entire way of knowing the world gets trapped out of hearing, gone forever.
Nearly all of them could be extinct in the next two centuries, says University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus Michael Krauss.
“I claim that it is catastrophic for the future of mankind,” Krauss said during a session on the phenomena of extinction at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in San Francisco. “It should be as scary as losing 90 percent of the biological species.”
In his four decades at UAF, Krauss founded Alaska Native Language Center and organized the systematic study of Alaska’s indigenous languages. He was awarded the Ken Hale prize for lifetime achievement from the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas.
Alaska faces language loss at the same rate seen across the world. “Of the state’s twenty Native languages, only two (Siberian Yupik in two villages on St. Lawrence Island, and Central Yup’ik in seventeen villages in southwestern Alaska) are spoken by children as the first language of the home,” the language center states on its home page. “Like every language in the world, each of those twenty is of inestimable human value and is worthy of preservation.”
Multiplied over the world, such a loss of linguistic diversity is certainly unprecedented, a mass extinction that far surpasses even the worst predictions for our biosphere, Krauss wrote in his abstract. “Is Babel a blessing or a curse? The same could as well be asked about biodiversity.”
A release from UAF says goes further:
From an ethical standpoint, all languages are of equal value, he said. But the value of a language goes far beyond academic discourse, Krauss said.
Languages contain the intellectual wisdom of populations of people. They contain their observations of and adaptations to the world around them. Humanity became human in a complex system of languages that interacted with each other.
“That is somehow interdependent such that we lose sections of it at the same peril that we lose sections of the biosphere,” Krauss said. “Every time we lose (a language), we lose that much also of our adaptability and our diversity that gives us our strength and our ability to survive.”