Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today, a significant proportion have never been written down. They exist only in the mouths and ears of their speakers — in conversation, in song, in the stories told at night. When the last fluent speaker of such a language dies, nothing remains. No manuscript, no dictionary,…
For most of recorded history, the decipherment of ancient scripts has been a fundamentally human endeavour — part intuition, part obsessive pattern recognition, part luck. Michael Ventris spent years working on Linear B before his breakthrough in 1952. Jean-François Champollion needed the Rosetta Stone and a deep command of Coptic to crack Egyptian hieroglyphs. But…
When we talk about endangered languages, the conversation almost always centres on spoken words — the fading voices of elderly speakers, the unwritten grammars of remote communities, the oral traditions that die when the last fluent speaker passes. But there is a parallel crisis unfolding in silence: the world’s sign languages are disappearing too, and…
In a small classroom on the Big Island of Hawai’i, a three-year-old greets her teacher entirely in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi — the Hawaiian language. Her parents don’t speak it. Her grandparents don’t speak it. But she does, because she attends a Pūnana Leo, a “language nest” where Hawaiian isn’t a subject to be studied but the…
Somewhere in the world, a language is falling silent. Not with a dramatic last word or a ceremonial farewell, but quietly — in the gap between an elderly grandmother who dreams in her mother tongue and grandchildren who reply in the national language. According to current estimates, one language disappears approximately every two weeks. At…
A language dies roughly every two weeks. With nearly half of the world’s 7,000 languages at risk of vanishing within a generation, linguists and technologists are locked in an unprecedented race against time. But a new ally has emerged: artificial intelligence. From New Zealand to the American Midwest, AI-powered tools are opening pathways to document,…
The survival of human languages and the manuscripts that record them is not just a matter of cultural pride. It is a race against the erosion of knowledge itself. Linguists estimate that roughly 31,000 languages have existed throughout human history; only 6,000–7,000 remain today, meaning more than 80 % have gone extinct . Even among the…
In an era where globalization threatens indigenous traditions, the Blackfeet people of Montana face a profound challenge: safeguarding their language as the cornerstone of their cultural identity. A groundbreaking 1999 study by Dorothy M. Still Smoking, affiliated with the Blackfeet Tribe Head Start Program and Piegan Institute, Inc., delves into this issue through the voices…
Languages have been disappearing for centuries, but the pace of language extinction has accelerated in recent history. Linguists estimate that roughly 31,000 languages have existed throughout human history, yet only about 6,000–7,000 remain today – meaning over 80% of all languages have already gone extinct . Small, minority languages are especially vulnerable in the modern…
Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today, a significant proportion have never been written down. They exist only in the mouths and ears of their speakers — in conversation, in song, in the stories told at night. When the last fluent speaker of such a language dies, nothing remains. No manuscript, no dictionary,…
For most of recorded history, the decipherment of ancient scripts has been a fundamentally human endeavour — part intuition, part obsessive pattern recognition, part luck. Michael Ventris spent years working on Linear B before his breakthrough in 1952. Jean-François Champollion needed the Rosetta Stone and a deep command of Coptic to crack Egyptian hieroglyphs. But…
When we talk about endangered languages, the conversation almost always centres on spoken words — the fading voices of elderly speakers, the unwritten grammars of remote communities, the oral traditions that die when the last fluent speaker passes. But there is a parallel crisis unfolding in silence: the world’s sign languages are disappearing too, and…
In a small classroom on the Big Island of Hawai’i, a three-year-old greets her teacher entirely in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi — the Hawaiian language. Her parents don’t speak it. Her grandparents don’t speak it. But she does, because she attends a Pūnana Leo, a “language nest” where Hawaiian isn’t a subject to be studied but the…
Somewhere in the world, a language is falling silent. Not with a dramatic last word or a ceremonial farewell, but quietly — in the gap between an elderly grandmother who dreams in her mother tongue and grandchildren who reply in the national language. According to current estimates, one language disappears approximately every two weeks. At…
A language dies roughly every two weeks. With nearly half of the world’s 7,000 languages at risk of vanishing within a generation, linguists and technologists are locked in an unprecedented race against time. But a new ally has emerged: artificial intelligence. From New Zealand to the American Midwest, AI-powered tools are opening pathways to document,…
The survival of human languages and the manuscripts that record them is not just a matter of cultural pride. It is a race against the erosion of knowledge itself. Linguists estimate that roughly 31,000 languages have existed throughout human history; only 6,000–7,000 remain today, meaning more than 80 % have gone extinct . Even among the…
In an era where globalization threatens indigenous traditions, the Blackfeet people of Montana face a profound challenge: safeguarding their language as the cornerstone of their cultural identity. A groundbreaking 1999 study by Dorothy M. Still Smoking, affiliated with the Blackfeet Tribe Head Start Program and Piegan Institute, Inc., delves into this issue through the voices…
Languages have been disappearing for centuries, but the pace of language extinction has accelerated in recent history. Linguists estimate that roughly 31,000 languages have existed throughout human history, yet only about 6,000–7,000 remain today – meaning over 80% of all languages have already gone extinct . Small, minority languages are especially vulnerable in the modern…