"There are more than 7,000 languages on Earth, yet half of the world’s 7.6 billion people speak just 24 of them and 95 percent speak just 400 of them. That leaves five percent of the global population spread across 6,600 different languages, hundreds of them now spoken by less than ten people.
"rate of language loss has reached such a breakneck pace that some scholars predict we’ll lose 90 percent of the world’s languages in the next century, akin to a linguistic mass extinction event.
"...The evolution of culture, according to influential thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, has its own currency: the meme. A meme is unit of a cultural knowledge — like a song, story, recipe, art, or style of dress — that can be passed along primarily through the use of language. Memes, like genes, mutate as they pass from one brain to the next, if these mutated memes gain traction, they may evolve into new cultures and languages.
"Interestingly, the regions of the world with the greatest biological diversity are also the ones with the most languages. In general, language diversity follows Rapaport’s Rule, which states that species density is highest at the equator and thins out as you move north and south toward the poles. And there are also distinct “hotspots” of biocultural diversity across the Amazon Basin, Central Africa, and the Indonesia/Malaysia region, home to the undisputed champion of linguistic diversity: New Guinea.
"Of the 7,000 languages in the world, 1,000 of them are spoken exclusively in New Guinea. With a population of less than 12 million, that means that 14 percent of the world’s languages are spoken by 0.14 percent of global population.
"One of the theories explaining why linguistic diversity blossoms in the tropics is that lots of rivers and mountains divide the landscape, isolating small pockets of people. As Darwin found on the Galapagos Islands, geographic isolation allows for distinct traits to evolve out of the same species. That may help explain the language diversity in New Guinea, said Loh, which is carved up by rivers and mountains, and where tribes are not only isolated, but often hostile to outsiders.
"The chief difference between biological and linguistic evolution is the speed of change.
“Biological evolution takes place over millions of years. Languages and cultures evolve incredibly fast by comparison,” said Loh. “If you go back in English to Chaucer, who died only 600 years ago, it’s really hard to read and understand his English. Within 25 generations, that ability to understand has gone, because the language has changed so much.”
"...It’s clear that economic forces threaten both biological diversity and linguistic diversity. Members of economically marginalized indigenous communities often migrate to bigger cities or even other countries to support their families, shifting to the dominant language for work. Similarly, the globalization of manufacturing increases the plundering of natural resources, which drives habitat loss, one of the main ways that endangered species go extinct.
"What’s doubly troubling is that when a language dies out, so does a wealth of knowledge about native plants and animals, exactly the type of information that conservationists need to protect critical species. Some conservation biologists estimate that indigenous communities, which cluster in regions with the greatest natural biodiversity, are the stewards of 99 percent of the world’s genetic diversity.
"Richard Stepp is an ethnobiologist at the University of Florida who has conducted fieldwork among indigenous Mayan communities in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala.
“In some of these cultures, the single largest category of nouns are plant names. They may have thousands of plant names,” Stepp told Seeker. “So the biodiversity is intimately linked to the language.”
"Languages, like species, deserve to be preserved for their own sake, but there are also more utilitarian reasons to want to preserve the knowledge encoded in indigenous languages. For example, only a fraction of the world’s plants have been exhaustively studied for their medicinal properties, but it’s very likely that indigenous cultures have cumutively tested just about everything.
"“For a lot of these cultures, their primary healthcare is what they find growing around their house,” said Stepp. “In order to know what’s on the shelf of that living pharmacy, you have to have the language.”"
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