You might be living through another mass extinction of species—brought on by us humans, who have been changing climate and fragmenting habitats at an increasing clip—but what you probably don't know is that you might also be living through a mass extinction of human languages—brought on by the magic of the internet. According to a paper titled “Digital Language Death,” just published in PLOS One, less than five percent of the 7,000 languages spoken today will ascend to the digital realm. Granted, languages have been dying as long as they’ve been spoken, but the Endangered Languages Project reports that “the pace at which languages are disappearing today has no precedent and is alarming.” András Kornai, author of the new paper, blames the internet for why we’re more likely to be speaking French than, say, Mandinka, in the future. [...] The great flat, globalized world of the internet operates pretty much as a monoculture [...] Only about 250 languages can be called well-established online, and another 140 are borderline. Of the 7,000 languages still alive, perhaps 2,500 will survive, in the classical sense, for another century, and many fewer will make it on to the internet.
As a test of vitality, Kornai began where all research begins: Wikipedia. “Experience shows that Wikipedia is always among the very first active digital language communities, and can be safely used as an early indicator of some language actually crossing the digital divide,” Kornai writes. “Children, as soon as they start using computers for anything beyond gaming, become aware of Wikipedia, which offers a highly supportive environment of like-minded users, and lets everyone pursue a goal, summarizing human knowledge, that many find not just attractive, but in fact instrumental for establishing their language and culture in the digital realm. To summarize a key result of this study in advance:
No wikipedia, no ascent.” There are 533 proposals for Wikipedia languages in incubator stage, more than twice the number of actual Wikipedias, but Kornai estimates no more than a third of them will ever get the required minimum of at least five active users and get enough pages to make it onto Wikipedia proper. [...] Kornai makes a compelling case for diversity and what we miss when a language disappears:
Each language reflects a unique world-view and culture complex, mirroring the manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the world, and has formulated its thinking, its system of philosophy and understanding of the world around it. In this, each language is the means of expression of the intangible cultural heritage of people, and it remains a reflection of this culture for some time even after the culture which underlies it decays and crumbles, often under the impact of an intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan, different culture.
“Intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan”—If he’d added in “vulgar” he’d have described the internet perfectly. [...] Kornai's fairly sure that this is the end of most of these languages. "Evidently, what we are witnessing is not just a massive die-off of the world’s languages, it is the final act of the Neolithic Revolution, with the urban agriculturalists moving on to a different, digital plane of existence, leaving the hunter-gatherers and nomad pastoralists behind," he wrote. Well, just as there are still hunter gatherers somewhere in the world today, pockets of these languages will remain where they always have: in the meat space. The internet might not be making room for all of the world's languages to have their own Wikipedia, but many will at least get their own Wikipedia page. Even when they're no longer spoken, the internet will no doubt maintain resources for preserving languages as subjects of study, so at the very least the wisdom in them won't be lost forever when the last speaker signs off.
