EVERY year, 25 languages die out, on average. The world has perhaps 5000 living languages 鈥� though estimates vary 鈥� so by the end of this century there will be only half this number. In North America alone, there were between 600 and 700 languages when Columbus landed in 1492. This number had fallen to 213 by 1962, of which only 89 languages had speakers ranging from children to the elderly. Since then at least 50 more have gone extinct. For example, died in 1987 in Pala, California, aged 94.
, a professor of linguistics at the Coll猫ge de France in Paris, has studied this decline for more than three decades. His academic book, On the Death and Life of Languages, which was first published in French in 2000 and has now been translated into English, is a wake-up call, covering languages across the globe, from Cornish to the polyglot brew of Papua New Guinea. Hag猫ge has no doubt that linguistic imperialism is largely responsible for the problem: 鈥淭he death threat that weighs upon languages today takes the guise of English,鈥� he concludes glumly. 鈥淎nd I wager that the wisest anglophones would not, in fact, wish for a world with only one language.鈥�
However, he also focuses on how a few dying languages, such as Welsh, have been saved by their native-speakers, assisted by governments. The in Israel receives detailed treatment. Uniquely, Hebrew is a spoken language fabricated from a written language; it has been used by Jewish scholars since biblical times. Modern Hebrew鈥檚 messianic proponent, the Zionist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, faced stiff opposition to the plan. A fellow Jew sarcastically told him: 鈥淚f you only speak a dead language to your children, you will make them idiots!鈥�
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Still, it鈥檚 amazing to consider that in the early 20th century, , because of its use in technical schools. Einstein, inaugurating the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1923, managed just one sentence in Hebrew, then switched to his native German.
Yale University Press
