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…
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…