Today, and with the arrival of the Internet to the homes of the majority, with just a couple of clicks and Google “learn languages”, you will see thousands of pages offering language courses. In general, and according to almost all statistics, English appears in the first place of the most learned, vastly surpassing the French and Spanish, his closest followers. It can be stated, without mistake, that English is the language of the world – or, at least, that of business – which replaced Latin centuries ago. and that it is required as a condition in many jobs. The truth is that these language pages and applications only offer courses, classes and activities of the most spoken and “important” languages on the globe, languages that can be counted on the fingers of the hands.
Several studies claim that More than 7,000 languages are spoken in the world, of which hardly 300 are spoken by more than a million people and just 85 are the languages spoken by 80% of the world’s population. But the statistics bring us another fact that is frankly more worrying and less talked about: thatOf these 7,000 languages, half (3,500) are spoken by less than 10 million people and 2,580 (almost 45% of the total) are in danger of extinction. Globalization, in part, has caused many of them to fall into disuse, not only because of their complexity but also because they do not have writing.
Dead languages (or about to die)
A dead language is defined as that language that has lost all of its native speakers, although it continues to be used in different scenarios. The clearest and best-known example of this phenomenon is provided by Latin. This, after having been the language of the Roman Empire that subjugated the world, today is an official language only in the Vatican. Beyond the fact that some of its expressions continue to be used in bureaucratic or legal spheres, the truth is that No one in the entire world had Latin as their mother tongue. Unlike other languages that have died or disappeared, the history of Latin has meant that it is still present in some way because it is the language from which others such as Spanish, French, Italian, etc. were derived, but above all, because have a clear and concise writing system. The big problem they face many languages in danger of extinction, on the contrary, is that they are strictly oral languages. Not graphic characters, grammatical rules or any structure, making it complicated not only to learn but also to preserve it because, how do you recover sounds that cannot even be written down?
According to data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), a new language disappears every two weeks. And, with it, a way of seeing the world also dies, stories of hundreds of years stop being told, while words, values and traditions lose their meaning forever. How many languages are we talking about? In the last decade alone, more than a hundred have stopped speaking to each other. Almost 60 are the other languages that – although they have not yet died – have a very near end because, in addition to not having writing, they are spoken by a single person on the entire planet. The scenario is increasingly discouraging and irreversible.
In America it is estimated that There are more than 400 threatened languages, mainly in the Amazon and the southern United States. Argentina is also no stranger to this phenomenon of disappearing languages and it is estimated that there are between 10 and 15 languages in danger of extinction, and more than 12 have already been classified as dead. Among those that are extinct we have among the best known the gününa këna, the selk’nam or ona (which in 2014 lost one of the only two people who knew how to semi-communicate in the language) or the yagan, which on February 16, 2022 and because of COVID it lost its last native speaker, Cristina Calderón Harban, so it is officially a dead language.
Languages in danger of extinction in Argentina
But, in which areas of Argentina were these languages spoken that we may not even have known? The dead languages were in the Patagonian area (both in Argentina and Chile) and began to die after the success of the misnamed Desert Campaign, which marked a before and after in the lives of the indigenous people of the region, and above all, in their native languages. The hegemony of Spanish and the complexity of communicating in their native languages (almost all without writing) meant that little by little, the children and grandchildren of the Aboriginal population moved away from their lineage and had Spanish as their main language.
But it’s not all bad news. In 2012, the University of Hawaii (UHM), United States, began The Endangered Languages Project (ELP), the endangered languages project, according to its translation. Thanks to this and for more than a decade, scientists have been collecting data, videos, audios and documents of languages that are little by little losing their speakers, with the aim of preserving their words, phrases, verbs and that they are not mere legends of the past. In the page https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/about/ There is not only valuable information, but also an interactive map showing the language areas and their status.
Threat levels range from “at risk” – in the best cases – to “in serious danger of extinction” – in the worst. The objective of the space is to help these languages as much as possible to persist over time and become immortalized, at least, on the internet. The program in turn admits and promotes the participation of users from all over the world (participation is, of course, non-profit) in order to obtain as much information as possible about these languages.
In a world where everything seems more connected, more united and less diversified every day, the death of what is foreign and different is a very everyday thing. The death of a language does not mean, however, that we are closer to a global union. In fact, Esperanto was created specifically for that and never achieved its purpose. At the same time, it is already known that Every fifteen days a new language is lost and with it it is a culture that dies. There is a vision of the world that ceases to exist, a reality that never returns. Languages are a trace of the past and the present, but sometimes – and unfortunately – they are no longer a trace of the future.
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