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There are more than seven thousand languages spoken in the world today, and yet this astonishing diversity is shrinking. According to UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, more than forty percent of them are at risk of disappearing. It is often repeated that one language falls silent every two weeks. Experts disagree about the exact figure, but they agree on the direction: the number is falling, and the fall is accelerating.
A language does not usually die in a single moment. Its decline tends to follow a pattern. Children in a community begin to learn a dominant language in school, at work, and in the media, since that is the language of opportunity. Their parents, who want them to succeed, often speak to them in the dominant language at home. Two generations later, only the grandparents are fluent. When the last of them dies, the language leaves the world of the living.
It is important to stress that this process is seldom a matter of free choice alone. In many places, speakers have been discouraged, or even punished, for using their mother tongue, and the prestige of the dominant language has been built over centuries. Communities that decide to abandon their language are often responding to real pressures, not to a lack of affection for what they are leaving behind.
What is lost when a language disappears? Linguists point out that each language holds a huge body of knowledge: names for local plants and animals, methods of navigation, oral history, stories, songs, and ways of describing the world that cannot be translated exactly into another tongue. To lose a language is, in part, to lose a library that nobody has had time to read.
Guatemala offers a clear example of both the danger and the hope. The country officially recognized twenty-one Mayan languages in 1996, and their speakers are a large proportion of its population. Some, such as K'iche' and Q'eqchi', are spoken by a great many people, while others have very few speakers left. Bilingual schools, academies, and community radio stations are working to keep them alive, although the pressure of Spanish in school and work remains strong.
Revival is not impossible. Hebrew, which for centuries was used mainly in writing and in religious life, has become the everyday language of millions of people. Welsh has gained speakers through schools and media. These cases show that a language can return, but only when its speakers, and their children, find a reason to use it.
Perhaps the most useful question is not how many languages will survive, but what kind of world we want to have. A world in which every child can learn in the language of her grandmother, and also in a language of opportunity, would be richer than one in which she must choose.
