8 Languages on the Verge of Extinction

Around the world, a spoken language vanishes every two weeks, according to statistics presented at a United Nations conference on indigenous languages. It seems hard to imagine that a group of people would suddenly stop speaking a certain language. But consider this: According to the U.N., most languages are spoken by very few people. About 97 percent of the world's population speaks just 4 percent of its languages, while 3 percent speaks 96 percent of them.

Languages have been dying for centuries. Around 8,000 B.C., Earth was home to more than 20,000 dialects. Today that number stands between 6,000 and 7,000, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) lists more than 2,000 of them as vulnerable or endangered.

How Do Languages Die?

There are a few ways for languages to die.

The Speakers Die Out

The first and most obvious, is if all the people who speak it have died. This may occur, for example, if war or a natural disaster wipes out small populations or tribes in remote areas, like the 2004 earthquake that struck off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, triggering a tsunami that left 230,000 people dead. Another killer of language is foreign disease. As Mount Holyoke University explains: "By the time of exploration, diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox had been common in Europe for centuries, meaning that individuals had built antibodies and immunity. When they traveled to foreign lands, they took the diseases with them, infecting indigenous peoples. The inhabitants of the New World had never been exposed to such diseases, and as a consequence, millions died in short periods of time."

The Speakers Choose to Stop Using Them

But there's a more simple explanation for why languages disappear: people simply stop speaking them. Sometimes people stop speaking a language to avoid political persecution, as was the case in 1932 in El Salvador, when speakers of the indigenous Lenca and Cacaopera languages abandoned them after a massacre in which Salvadoran troops killed tens of thousands of indigenous people. Other times people will abandon a regional dialect in favor of a more common global language, such as English or French, to gain socioeconomic advantages. Gradually, they may lose fluency in their native tongue and stop passing it down to the next generation.

The Importance of Preserving Languages

Preserving these languages is important, and UNESCO explains why: "Languages are humankind’s principle tools for interacting and for expressing ideas, emotions, knowledge, memories and values. Languages are also primary vehicles of cultural expressions and intangible cultural heritage, essential to the identity of individuals and groups. Safeguarding endangered language is thus a crucial task in maintaining cultural diversity worldwide."

8 Languages in Danger of Extenction

Below are eight of the thousands of native tongues at risk of never being spoken again.

Icelandic

Surprisingly, a native language for an entire country is slowly dying due to digital technology and social media. Icelandic has been around since the 13th century and still maintains its complex grammar structure.

However, only approximately 340,000 people speak the language. Younger Icelanders are speaking more English because their lives are so intrinsically involved in an English-speaking social media world. Therefore, they find themselves primarily speaking English and not learning their native tongue.

"It’s called ‘digital minoritization’," said University of Iceland Professor Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson told The Guardian. "When a majority language in the real world becomes a minority language in the digital world."

Also, digital companies are not inclined to provide Icelandic options. "For them, it costs the same to digitally support Icelandic as it does to digitally support French," Rögnvaldsson said. "Apple, Amazon ... If they look at their spreadsheets, they’ll never do it. You can’t make a business case."

Another factor for the language's slow demise is that nearly everyone who speaks Icelandic is also proficient in English — mainly due to the country's bustling tourism industry.

Haida

For centuries, the Haida people lived in a territory between northern British Columbia and Alaska. When European settlers arrived in 1772, nearly 15,000 people spoke Haida. Now, there are only about 20 speakers left, and the language is listed as "critically endangered" by UNESCO. Sadly, most of the speakers are in their 70s and 80s. Use of the language sharply declined due to assimilation and a ban on speaking Haida in schools, and today most Haida people don't speak the language.

Listen to a group of Haida women speak the language and talk about their ancestral history:

Jedek

In a small village on the Malay Peninsula, linguists recently discovered a language that had never been documented before. “Jedek is not a language spoken by an unknown tribe in the jungle, as you would perhaps imagine, but in a village previously studied by anthropologists. As linguists, we had a different set of questions and found something that the anthropologists missed,” Niclas Burenhult, associate professor of general linguistics at Lund University, said in a statement.

The Jedek language is unique because it reflects the culture of the villagers. There are no words for violent acts or competition among kids. Because it's a hunter-gatherer community, there's also no words for occupations or borrow, steal, buy or sell. However, there are many words to describe sharing and exchanging.

Sadly, Jedek is only spoken in this one particular village of 280 inhabitants and will likely go extinct in the future.

Listen to the only recording of Jedek:

Elfdalian

Believed to be the closest descendant of Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, Elfdalian is spoken in the community of Älvdalen in a remote part of Sweden surrounded by mountains, valleys and forests. Its secluded location protected the culture for centuries, but recently locals have taken to using more modern Swedish instead. Recent estimates indicate that fewer than 2,500 people speak Elfdalian, and less than 60 children under the age of 15 are fluent in it.

You can hear it in this video, where two men and two women read from a text:

Marshallese

On the Marshall Islands, a chain of coral atolls that sit between Australia and Hawaii, the population is leaving in droves due to climate change and rising sea levels. Locals speak Marshallese, and as Grist reports, the largest population of Marshallese people outside of the islands is in Springdale, Arkansas. There, immigrants tend to assimilate and will likely lose their language within a few generations.

"There’s definitely the sense that if you don't speak Marshallese, you're not really a Marshallese person," Peter Rudiak-Gould, an anthropologist who has studied the Marshall Islands for 10 years, told Grist. "The culture couldn't really survive without language." He added: "Anywhere there's a coral atoll and a unique cultural group on that atoll, there's that potential for mass migration and extinction of languages."

Listen to three girls sing a song in Marshallese:

Wintu

The Wintu are a tribe of Native Americans who live in Northern California's Sacramento Valley. As settlers and foreign disease invaded their lands and killed their people, the tribe's population dwindled from 14,000 down to 150, where it stands today. According to UNESCO, only one fluent speaker remains along with several semi-speakers.

The struggle to preserve a centuries-old way of life in modern times is on display in this video, which shows a man singing a Wintu song while kids look disinterested and a woman chatters in the background about letting her fingernails grow longer.

Tofa

Also known as Karagas, this Siberian language is spoken in Russia's Irkutsk Oblast by the Tofalars. UNESCO lists it as critically endangered with about 40 speakers. The three remote villages in the Eastern Sayan mountain range that use this language are difficult to access, which has been both a blessing and a curse. While it helped preserve their culture, there are now no schools and most children attend Russian boarding schools (and speak Russian), according to Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine. With no new generation learning the language, it's unlikely to survive.

Aka

In India, Aka is spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, the country's northeasternmost state. As National Geographic reports, it's reachable only via a five-hour drive through the jungle. The village is entirely self-sufficient: They grow their own food, kill their own animals and build their own houses. But despite the remote location, Aka's youth no longer learn he formal language and instead learn Hindi, which they hear on TV, and English, which they use in schools. There are now only a few thousand speakers.

In another blend of old-world and modern day, two young men rap in Aka in this video: