Voices growing faint
Endangerment and revival
Every few months a language may lose its last native speaker. But some languages have come back from the dead.
Chapter 1
Half of all languages
Of the 8,004 languages on this globe, 4,093 are endangered to some degree and 1,051 are already extinct (the hollow dots). The darker the colour, the closer a language is to falling silent.
Chapter 2
Australia
Australia had about 250 languages when Europeans arrived; only a dozen or so are still learned by children. With them go distinctive ways of thinking — Guugu Yimithirr, for one, barely uses “left” and “right”, placing everything by compass direction.
Chapter 3
Close to home
In East Asia, Manchu was once the official language of an empire and now has a handful of native speakers; Ainu in Hokkaido survives with very few elders. Language loss is usually quiet: parents stop speaking it to their children, and a generation later it lives only in recordings.
Chapter 4
Languages that came back
Loss is not always final. Hebrew became an everyday language again after nearly two thousand years without native speakers; Hawaiian and Māori returned to children through “language nest” preschools; Cornish and Manx were reawakened even after being declared extinct.
Chapter 5
Seven thousand ways of seeing
Every language is a way of seeing the world: how to count, give directions, name your kin, tell a joke. You may never learn most of them — but knowing they exist is itself a kind of care. Turn the globe and look somewhere you have never heard of.