Speaking of Words
By Michael Ferber

Of the 7,159 living languages in the world that the Ethnologue website now lists, it considers 3,193 to be “endangered,” that is, “It is no longer the norm that children learn and use this language.”   That’s 45%.  The Catalogue of Endangered Languages has compiled data on the “current vitality” of 3,394 languages, a slightly higher number.  Ethnologue makes a further distinction: where “the child-bearing generation is no longer able to transmit the language to the next generation,” the language is “dying”; there are 1,030 of these, or 14%.  It also reports that 454 languages have become extinct during the recent centuries of European expansion.

Wikipedia has an impressive (and depressing) list of extinct languages, starting with the most recent extinctions and running back several thousand years.  It names three languages as having gone extinct in 2024, but since it cites an article in the Jakarta Globe that names eleven recent extinctions in Indonesia alone, it is surely not up to date.  It tells us, however, that the last speaker of Columbia-Wenatchi in Northern Idaho died in 2023 at age 96; her name was Pauline Stensgar.  The last speaker of Quapaw in Oklahoma died in 2022 at age 91; her name was Ardina Moore.  The last speaker of Bering Aleut died in 2021 at age 93; her name was Vera Timoshenko.  Some 95 languages, according to this list, went extinct in our century.  Over 250 died in the twentieth.

Before long there will be many more on the list, including the last remaining fluent speaker of Njuu, a “click” language of South Africa; her name is Ouma Katrina Esau, and she is now 92.  Of 2183 living African languages, the Catalogue of Endangered Languages reports, 604 are considered endangered.  About an eighth of the endangered ones are “critically” or “severely” endangered.

When these languages die, sometimes a similar dialect may live on, and may even flourish, but usually nothing remains except, with any luck, some tapes and transcriptions and studies by linguists, not usually enough to revive them.  They are gone, and gone with them are their cultures: their songs, dances, ceremonies, games, jokes, stories, ways of seeing the natural world, and works of skill and art.

People speak misleadingly of another kind of extinction or death that is quite a different thing.  Is Latin a dead language?  I think no one speaks it today as a native or first language, though there are some who are fluent in it as a second language; the late Justice David Souter is said to have been quite good at it.  So Classical Latin may be dead, or artificially sustained as “undead,” but it also lives on as the most widely spoken first language in the world, in the many dialects that we call Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Sardinian, and dozens more.  Old English is extinct, of course, as a spoken language, but its direct descendant is the indisputable world language today. 

Languages constantly change, year by year.  I don’t fully understand the variant of English my daughter speaks with her friends, but she is bilingual and can speak my language—my version of English—fluently.  By the same token, if I were to meet Charles Dickens on the street today, I would understand him fairly well (I’ve read a lot of his books), but he would have great difficulty understanding me, unless I switched codes to nineteenth-century British.  And so it goes, generation after generation, a perfectly normal evolution found in every tongue, though it goes faster in some languages than others.  There’s no point in regretting it.

But it is a mournful fact that every month or so the world loses a language completely, a language with no offspring. 

It is heartening to learn, however, that in many countries there are programs dedicated to teaching children to speak their elders’ dying language.  To mention a few efforts in the US: There are some eighty fluent Chippewa Cree speakers in Montana, and some of them are active in classes and activities for children.  The University of New Mexico has a project where linguists and other scholars are working with native speakers of Jicarilla Apache.  The Wampanoag Language Reclamation Project had to deal with fact that their were no elders who spoke Wampanoag (or Massachusett), so Jessie Little Doe Baird, who co-founded the Project in 1993, got a degree in linguistics from MIT in order to help her reconstruct it.  There were opaque transcriptions by a white missionary, but not much else to go on, so she studied a few related Algonquian languages still surviving in New England and worked out what must have been the lost words and structures of Wampanoag.  After thirty years the Project has born fruit, for there are now some fluent young native speakers.

Projects like these cost money, and local tribes seldom can afford them alone.  The Chippewa Cree program costs about a million dollars a year, nearly all of it from Federal sources.  In December 2024 the Biden administration announced a ten-year National Plan on Native Language Revitalization, calling for a $16.7 billion investment.  Donald Trump, who wants to make English the only official language of the United States (though he can barely speak it himself), is not likely to support this plan, any more than he supports efforts to rescue endangered species.  The Federal Government may well relapse to its vicious policy of “killing the Indian to save the man.”  As for Trump, he would no doubt like to deport all the Native American tribes, with their languages, back to the countries he thinks they came from. 

I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.