#LANGUAGES LOST TO TIME FULL#

Recent tectonic movements have also caused parts of some islands to sink. The threat facing islanders in Vanuatu is not just due to rising sea levels. The areas affected by climate-related disasters are often ones that exhibit great linguistic diversity and include languages with small numbers of speakers, which are especially vulnerable. Climate-related disasters displaced an estimated 20m people in 2008. It is already clear that climate change influences modern migration patterns. In the coming centuries, we may experience an increase in climate-related migration. ‘The King and the God’ in what linguists think Proto-Indo-European sounded like. Some even argue that up to 90% of today’s languages will have disappeared by 2115. Linguists estimate that about 50% of the languages spoken today will disappear in the next 100 years. Most of these have never been recorded and so would be lost forever. Often a language’s death is recorded when the last known speaker dies, and about 35% of languages in the world are currently losing speakers or are more seriously endangered. Studying diverse languages gives us invaluable insights into human cognition. This diversity is evidence of the enormous flexibility and plasticity of the human brain and its capacity for communication. Sign languages show us that languages do not even need to be spoken. Every absolute that linguists have posited has been challenged, and linguists are busy debating if there is anything at all that is common to all languages in the world or anything at all that does not exist in the languages of the world.

These languages exhibit enormous diversity, from the number of distinctive sounds (there are languages with as few as 11 different sounds and as many as 118) to the vast range of possible word orders, structures and concepts that languages use to convey meaning. There are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world today. A good example is Vanuatu, an island state in the Pacific, with quite a dramatic recent rise in sea levels. An increase in climate-change related natural disasters may affect linguistic diversity. And linguistic diversity is crucial for understanding our capacity for language. Humans are the only species on the planet whose communication system exhibits enormous diversity. We know it threatens biodiversity, but what about linguistic diversity? It conjures up images of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, threatened habitats, endangered species, and displaced people.

#LANGUAGES LOST TO TIME FULL#

, through copies made on palm leaf.The 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) is in full gear and climate change is again on everyone’s mind. The Theravada school of Buddhism in Sri Lanka lays claim to the only whole set of scriptures that preserve Pāli, although in Burma, the Pali books have been preserved accurately since 387 A.D. As Buddhism died out in India, Pāli disappeared from the subcontinent – but was preserved in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The Buddha possibly could have spoken Sanskrit – the language of the elites – but he chose a vernacular that was once the lingua franca of the common man. Or to be more specific, a North-East-Indian language family, known as Prakrit. Transmitted generation to generation, sometimes up to 2500 years within a single family, these teachings were in a language that no longer exists today. The ‘samgīti’ or ‘singing together’ is called the first council – and it is the root of everything we know (or think we know) about Buddhism. When the Buddha passed away, it’s said that five hundred of his disciples got together and sang. How did these survive through millennia, in the absence of the written word? The answer is, quite simply, the spoken word. But there exists, nonetheless, a large canon of work based on his exact words. The Buddha is said to have existed in the fifth century B.C., in a time where none of his teachings were written down. Consider any saying you might have heard that is attributed to the ‘Enlightened One’. The words of the Buddha have taken a long and perilous path to reach the 21st century.

Languages lost to time