What Happens When We Lose a Language?

We are lucky to know anything at all about the Ubykh language. In the 1800s, tens of thousands of people spoke it on the Black Sea coast. When Russia conquered the region, the Ubykhs resisted until they were forced into exile in the Ottoman empire. Transported thousands of miles by a traumatised community now scattered across Turkey, Ubykh survived until 1992 when its last fluent speaker died. It was one of at least 244 languages that has become extinct since 1950, and soon – unless anything changes – my grandmother’s language will have joined them.

Over the next 40 years, language loss has been predicted to triple without intervention. Yet we hear about language endangerment far less often than we hear about other wounding losses to our planet’s diversity or history. Deforestation in Costa Rica is being reversed following the realisation of the enormous natural and scientific resource that may disappear with its trees. International archaeologists rallied to preserve and restore ancient remains in Syria following the destruction wreaked by Islamic State. But the efforts of those labouring to document or preserve minority languages are rarely celebrated.

The databases that do exist, such as Ethnologue, chart unfathomable cultural riches contained within more than 7,000 known living languages. But a staggering 44% of these are now classed endangered, many of them with fewer than 1,000 speakers left. One-nation-one-language narratives lull us into assuming France speaks French, China speaks Mandarin; this ignores the tens and even hundreds of regional languages, many of whose speakers have experienced everything from active persecution to bans in school to simply feeling stigmatised for speaking their mother tongue.

Some communities are lucky enough to have the political or cultural autonomy to protect their languages – think of Welsh or Māori – but many aren’t so fortunate. Some rue and rally; others resign themselves to decline, not because they’ve actively chosen to abandon a language, but because maintaining it in the face of a more dominant one takes huge resolve and resources.