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3 extinct languages of the 21st century

Travelling by dog sled, bearing several months of darkness and eating a diet usually reserved for polar bears is hardly anyone’s idea of a comfortable lifestyle.

Iceberg in GreenlandBut as Cambridge researcher Dr Stephen Pax Leonard is about to find out, this is standard procedure for the northernmost Inuits of Qaanaaq, Greenland - called Inughuits. Leonard is to live with them for a year to discover the potential dangers their culture faces. Their environment is becoming less hospitable for hunting, making it increasingly difficult for the natives to provide themselves with food.

In spite of this, the real danger this culture faces is that is that their native dialect of Inuktun is spoken by only a thousand of the Inuit population today.

Fishing in Greenland

Vanishing language is a dangerous sign of a depleting way of life.  Part of Leonard’s project is to become fluent in Inuktun in the hope of restoring it to the future generations. This is integral - their language, which has never been written down in full, is used to communicate their history, spirituality and other forms of practical knowledge. 

The Inughuits aren’t alone. By some estimates, thousands of the world’s 6,700 languages will be lost before the turn of the next century. The death of a language, especially written language, can render historical accounts completely encrypted to the world. There are secrets within the thousands of clay tablets unearthed in ancient Kamet, India and the burial mounds of Sudan which scholars have been unable to decipher because the language is dead. 

Here are just a few languages we've lost since the year 2000: 

Gaagudju

  • When Big Bill Neidjie died on 23 may 2002, so did his native language, Gaagudju.
  • The extinct language was born in aboriginal Australia and formerly spoken in Arnhem Land, northern Australia.

Aka-Bo or Bo

  • Just this year in January, Boa Sr. the last surviving speaker of any Aka-Bo died aged around 85. Aka-Bo originates from the Andaman Islands in India.
  • The ‘Aka’ in its name was a common prefix for words related to the tongue, such as ‘language’.

Akkala Sami

  • This Russian Sami language was in use until December 2003. Its last known speaker was Marja Sergina, who left behind one of the most poorly documented languages of the Sami type.
  • It was most closely related to Skolt Sami, another Sami language spoken by approximately 400 people in Finland.

By Carla Pearce

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Submitted by Guest

Sad for Linguists

Fri, 2010-08-20 07:20
M Paul Lloyd

and loss of some cultural heritage, but could this not also be viewed as progress towards a common global language?