When Languages Die, Part 1

What We Lose, What We Gain, and What AI Might Save

Dear Friends,

When I reopen this Time Capsule in 2044, at least 3,000 endangered languages will be well on their way to extinction.¹ Today, researchers and digital activists are racing to preserve endangered languages² by building large language models with data from their last surviving speakers. Is AI poised to become, as one writer puts it, “the unexpected hero in the battle to save dying languages”?

I started drafting this week’s newsletter in June when I attended a conference of indigenous language activists convened by Rising Voices, the digital media initiative I founded back in 2006.³ After stepping away in 2010 to work in philanthropy, I’ve watched with admiration as Eddie Avila has shaped Rising Voices into a vital community for indigenous activists preserving their languages online. At the conference, I met activists and technologists working to document and preserve languages like Otomí, Purépecha, Kaqchikel, Ayöök, and Tsotsil, among others. I asked them all the same basic question: What do we lose when we lose a language?

Their responses (in Spanish, of course!) led me to reflect on a parallel question: What do we gain when we share the same language? What changed in my marriage when my wife became fluent in American English? What have I gained living in Oaxaca through my fluency in Mexican Spanish?

These are ancient questions. Genesis 11 describes how God scattered the descendants of Noah by “confusing their language so they would not understand each other’s speech.” But now, old questions take on new meaning as AI chatbots become fluent in endangered languages, even as globally connected humans increasingly do not.

Fighting for the Survival of Endangered Languages

Perhaps you remember the viral story from 2011 about the last two living speakers of Ayapaneco who refused to speak to one another because of a long-held grudge? The story was too good to be true (literally) but that didn’t stop Vodafone from hiring a German PR firm to launch a made-up campaign about their role in helping two old frenemies bury their beef and save their language from disappearing:

The story has been thoroughly debunked. They weren’t the last two speakers of Ayapaneco and they weren’t feuding. Though this particular story was made up to create a corporate marketing campaign, there is a kernel of truth in the fiction: around the world, languages that have existed for thousands of years are now spoken by fewer than ten people.

And here is a true story: In 2022, a man in Tamil Nadu died by setting himself on fire to protest India’s imposition of Hindi as the state’s official language. Why would someone douse himself in petrol and light a match over linguistics?

“Culture has no expression but language. The two are one and the same,” insists Ganesh Devy⁴ in a fascinating profile from this week’s New Yorker written by

Samanth Subramanian

, “Should a Country Speak a Single Language?”

---

Should it? More on that in a couple of days. Stay tuned for part two over the weekend: What do we gain from speaking the same language? And also, are we still postmodern?

Until then,

David

1. At the same time, machine learning will have profoundly revolutionized our understanding of linguistic patterns, reigniting debates about Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar.

2. And revive lost languages.

3. Just as Twitter was launching!

4. It’s a great line, but I wonder how much it still holds true as culture increasingly becomes a marker of individual identity rather than a communal bond.