International linguistic scholars estimate that without intervention, about one language will be lost every month for the next 40 years, with indigenous languages in northeast South America, Alaska to Oregon, and northern Australia at the highest risk.
A study published on April 19 in Science Advances said that currently, there are around 7,000 known languages on the planet, highlighting just how much humanity stands to lose and why it’s worth saving.
The languages are being documented in a publicly available library called Grammbank—currently, the world’s largest grammar database aimed at preserving this legacy of human communication, culture, and cognition.
Language experts from the Max Planck Society in Leipzig, Germany, with contributions from over 100 scholars from 68 institutions, including the Australian National University, the University of Auckland, and Harvard University, maintain the international collaboration.
Hannah Haynie, the co-author of the study and assistant linguistics professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said they had documented over half—about 4,300 languages.
“Right now we’re at a critical state in terms of language endangerment,” she said.
The speed of extinction has been accelerating due to social, political, and economic pressures, according to the researchers.
“Indigenous languages here in North America, languages around us and on our continent, are some of the most endangered languages in the world,” Haynie said.
A Target for Corruption
The loss of language diversity was predicted in the book “How the Specter of Communism Is Ruling Our World” by the editorial team of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.
It highlights how authorities in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four created Newspeak, an artificial language, in order to “diminish the range of thought” and reinforce the Party’s control over the people.
In many ways, the editorial team argue Orwell’s visions have become a reality. “Freedom” has been twisted to mean a state unrestrained by morality, law, or tradition.
Principles such as “all men are created equal” and “all men are equal before the law” have been distorted to mean absolute egalitarianism.
“Tolerance” has been deviated to mean acceptance of all sorts including thought and conduct that deny reality.
Rational thinking has been made a tool of narrow-minded empirical science. In the pursuit of equality of outcome, justice has become “social justice.”
The constant use of the word “gender”—a term relating to grammar—when we should use “sex” is another example of imposed, corrupted language in service of a political agenda.
Since language shapes our understanding of all human interactions, we ought to pay more attention when it becomes politicized, managed, and policed, according to Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute and former chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul.
“Like culture, language is not property, and it cannot be owned. But it can be influenced and steered,” Deist said.
“Deplatforming, cancelling, and even criminal ‘hate speech’ laws are the enforcement tools against wrong speak.”
