MEMETERIA by Thomas May

2nd-century mural from Teotihuacan, Mexico, depicting a person emitting a speech scroll from his mouth (via Wikipedia)

Fascinating New Yorker article by Judith Thurman on dying languages:

Linguists acknowledge that the data are inexact, but by the end of this century perhaps as many as fifty per cent of the world’s languages will, at best, exist only in archives and on recordings…. If the historical rate of loss is averaged, a language dies about every four months.

[…]

[T]he loss of languages passed down for millennia, along with their unique arts and cosmologies, may have consequences that won’t be understood until it is too late to reverse them.

[…]

If peripheral languages are to survive, they will have to find a way to coexist with what Bob Holman calls the “bully” languages.

Filed under: language