What happens when we lose a language?

A staggering 44% of human languages are endangered – with culture, tradition and whole ways of understanding the world at stake

We are lucky to know anything at all about the Ubykh language. In the 1800s, tens of thousands of people spoke it on the Black Sea coast. When Russia conquered the region, the Ubykhs resisted until they were forced into exile in the Ottoman empire. Transported thousands of miles by a traumatised community now scattered across Turkey, Ubykh survived until 1992 when its last fluent speaker died. It was one of at least 244 languages that has become extinct since 1950, and soon – unless anything changes – my grandmother’s language will have joined them.

Over the next 40 years, language loss has been predicted to triple without intervention. Yet we hear about language endangerment far less often than we hear about other wounding losses to our planet’s diversity or history. Deforestation in Costa Rica is being reversed following the realisation of the enormous natural and scientific resource that may disappear with its trees. International archaeologists rallied to preserve and restore ancient remains in Syria following the destruction wreaked by Islamic State. But the efforts of those labouring to document or preserve minority languages are rarely celebrated.