Loss of languages

Close to 7,000 distinct languages are still spoken today, more than half originating from just eight countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, China, Mexico, Cameroon, and Zaire. It is expected that by 2100 nearly half of today’s living tongues will have disappeared. If so, humanity will be considerably poorer. For each time a native language dies out, it is a distinct universe of mental constructs, with unique ecological wisdom acquired through millennia of direct contact with nature, which is lost. Gone is the refined Cheyenne technique of prairie management by fire in the dry mid-summers, almost gone the mysterious understanding of Namibian savanna animals by !Kung San hunters, and highly endangered the immense knowledge of the sea and its resources inherited by traditional fishing peoples from Oceania to the Arctic.

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