Living Languages

[POP!TECH] [BRINGS TOGETHER]
[THE WORLD'S LEADING THINKERS]
[TO SHARE INSPIRATION AND IDEAS]
[IGNITING CHANGE]
[AND UNLOCKING HUMAN POTENTIAL]
[THIS IS PART OF THEIR ONGOING CONVERSATION]
[POP!TECH] [POP!CAST]

DR. HARRISON : Thank you. Thank you, Andrew, for hosting this.
And thanks to all the organizers and the previous speakers.
In keeping with the theme of scarcity and abundance, I'd like to talk about intellectual scarcity and abundance
and particularly what's happening globally with languages.
[Global and local trends in language extinction]
[7,000+] There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world
and this represents the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled.
But they are rapidly going extinct and eroding under various pressures of globalization, which I will talk about today.
And this loss will be catastrophic for humanity, both in terms of science and technology and culture.
And not just to the people who speak these languages, but to all of us.
My work has been in tracking global trends of language extinction.
And this map gives you a sense of how unevenly distributed languages are around the planet.
Differences that we find among human languages are vast.
They're not just a question of using different sounds to say the same things.
But we're looking at entire conceptual universes of thought.
Each language has infinite expressive possibilities, infinite combinatorial possibilities,
and its grammar and in the way that it can package information and concepts.
So—the ingenuity and wisdom that we're seeing here in what I call the "Human Knowledge Base"
is under threat. And I'd like to talk, today, about why languages are going extinct,
where languages are going extinct, and why this matters to all of us.
And I'd like to give you two perspectives on the problem: a global and a local perspective.
The local perspective will come in the voices of some of the very last speakers of the world's most endangered languages
and I will be playing some video clips for you today.
And the global perspective is my own, as a scientist—a concerned scientist tracking this trend and thinking about
what can we do to sustain linguistic diversity on the planet before it disappears?
Starting with the local perspective, I'd like to just play for you a little clip. This is a lady named Hanna Köper.
She lives in South Africa and she is one of the eight remaining speakers of a language called N|u, N|u.
And I'd like you to just listen to her own words, her own perspective on this issue.

HANNA: Everyone used to get together
and speak the language.
We gathered, we discussed issues
we laughed in N|u.
I hear them speaking to me in my dreams sometimes
and they're speaking in N|u.
And I say to them in N|u, "Hey, keep quiet!
I'm sleeping."
So, what does it matter if N|u and languages like it go to sleep—if they go extinct?
And how are we all impoverished by this extinction?
We live in the digital age, and we like to imagine we have this kind of fantasy
that any information that is useful is available to us, somewhere, in writing,
in some book or library or database, or it can be Googled.
That's not true and, in fact, we're facing an immense knowledge gap.
Most of the world's languages have never been written down anywhere. They have not been recorded.
anywhere
They have not been adequately documented from a scientific point of view.
And so, as they vanish, we will have, literally, no record of them