Module IV·Article II·~1 min read
The Disappearance of Languages: Diversity as a Value
Language, Identity, and the Future
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The Scale of the Catastrophe
Out of ~7,000 languages in the world, it is predicted that by the end of the 21st century, between 50% and 90% will disappear. Every two weeks, the last speaker of some language dies. This is not simply a “cultural loss” — it is the loss of ways of seeing the world.
Pirahã (Brazilian Amazon) — a language without recursion, without numerals higher than “a few”, without a concept of the distant past or future. Speakers of this language literally cannot think in certain categories — or perhaps our language does not allow us to understand how they think without these categories.
Why Preserve?
Arguments for linguistic diversity: every language encodes unique knowledge about the local ecosystem, medical practices, modes of social organization. Ethnobotany: most medicinal plants are known to science thanks to the knowledge of indigenous cultures, encoded in their languages.
Question for reflection: An analogy with business: monoculture vs biodiversity. How does diversity of languages, methods, and approaches affect an organization’s innovation potential?
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