What is lost when a language dies?

The death of language?

As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?

"What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people," says Mr Hagege.

"It's also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express."

This statistic saddens me: 133 languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people.

In some cases, a language may be spoken by a single person. With that person's death, the language dies. Just as our environment's loss of heterogeneity is a threat, so is the loss of unique languages, which should be studied and conserved before it is too late.