We’re so used to languages borrowing from each other that it’s hard to imagine how an “isolate language” would work.
Some do end up standing entirely alone, however — often because all the tongues they borrowed from, and lent to, have died away.
Piraha, for instance, is the last surviving member of the Mura family of languages spoken along a tributary of the Amazon. Other isolates include Burushaski, which is spoken by the Burusho people in a few valleys in the Pakistani territory of Gilgit-Baltistan. And the Gilyak and Ket languages of Siberia.
Intriguingly, some isolates lost the rest of their linguistic tree so many centuries ago that there is no trace of the tongues they once drew from and lent to. Euskara, spoken in the Basque region of Spain, for instance, bears no resemblance to any of the languages in its surroundings. Most linguists believe this is because the Basque people continued to speak it, in its pure form, even as they were gradually surrounded by settlers from distant lands.
What’s interesting is that Euskara neither died out nor was diluted. What does it take for a language to survive intact? In a sense, it takes a miracle. Through history, languages have been subject to an almost-ruthless consolidation.
By the end of this century, linguists estimate that only 3,000 languages will remain, of the 7,000 in use today. By the 23rd century, some estimate that the figure may be as low as 100.
As communities integrate, or are marginalised to near-extinction, Aboriginal languages in particular are dying out fast. Recent victims have included Catawba (spoken by the Catawba people of Massachusetts), Eyak (of Alaska) and Livonian (of Latvia).
Meanwhile, the 11 most popular languages in the world are spoken by an overlapping mass that constitutes about half the global population. In descending order, these languages are: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, German and French.
In terms of points of origin, the geographic distribution varies wildly. More than half the world’s spoken languages come from just nine countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India, Cameroon, Australia, Mexico, Zaire and Brazil. In terms of continents, Europe is by far the least diverse in this respect, being the point of origin of only 3% of the languages spoken today.
In a bit of good news, we have got better at reviving languages, and keeping them alive. Mohawk has been taught in schools in Quebec since the 1970s. Icelandic, Welsh and Maori rebounded with government backing. Popular movements helped revive Navajo in the US and bring Irish back from the Celtic twilight; though that twilight looks set to soon claim Cornish.
My favourite salvage story: Faroese — an ancient Nordic tongue thought to have been used by the Vikings and now the national language of the Faroe Islands — was kept from going extinct in Denmark by that country’s government, which went as far as printing grammar hints and verb declensions on the sides of milk cartons. Gouwan morgun, as they’d say in Faroese!
(Adam Jacot de Boinod is the author of The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World)
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