Chasing Lost Languages

Summary

If humans have been talking for 200,000 years—for most of our species’ existence, that is—then an estimated half a million languages might have been spoken in all. To put that number in perspective, around 7,000 languages are spoken today. And because writing was only invented about 5,000 years ago, the vast majority of those half a million languages are lost to us, having been spoken in a preliterate world and died before they could be recorded. That’s half a million distinct systems of knowledge including histories, myths, songs, pharmacopoeias, recipes, jokes, prayers, and swear words that have vanished into oblivion. (It’s possible some of the earliest languages were signed rather than spoken.)TOWER OF BABEL: Author Laura Spinney was dismayed to realize just how many languages once spoken by humans were never recorded and have been lost to oblivion. Linguists can only piece together our linguistic past up through 10,000 years ago. Courtesy of Laura Spinney.Even if that number is off, which it might be because researchers disagree about when humans started speaking—some argue it was around 100,000 years ago, others that speaking predates our species—we can be confident that the number of languages that have ever been spoken dwarfs those that are spoken today. I find this fact dizzying and—I can’t help it—tragic. Think of all those ways of knowing and doing that have been invented and lost, only—in some cases—to be invented again. Think of all that gossip! ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . But it also has some quite staggering implications for our understanding of language. It means that living languages likely represent less than 2 percent of humanity’s full linguistic range, and a non-random sample at that—one heavily shaped, for example, by Western imperialism. And it gets worse. Perhaps only 10 percent of the languages that make up that 2 percent are well documented. When you consider that linguists continue to re...