by M. Sparga

Created on: March 12, 2009   Last Updated: March 14, 2009

It's perfectly natural for a language to evolve through the generations. However, some languages become abandoned entirely. With no speakers to perpetuate a language, it fails to spread to the next generation, and so it dies out. The tragedy of this phenomenon is that the cultures who originated these dying languages lose a significant part of their identity when the language goes extinct. Many practices, fables, and philosophical beliefs die with the language. And the rest of the world misses out on learning about how another culture viewed and defined the world. If we work to preserve dying languages while we can, the world will be richer for it.

Many Native American communities throughout North America are facing this very challenge. So much of their history, religious beliefs, and folk tales have been passed down orally, but with a dwindling number of speakers in a modern society dominated by English, these native languages suffer. One could argue that these languages not only perpetuate their culture, but they are also a significant part of their speaker's identity. Many of these native languages link words with, for example, sacred places, where just saying the name of such a place brings that spirituality with you wherever you are. The sanctity of words is lost when they switch to another language.

This issue goes well beyond North America. For example, the ancient Incas of South America had a sprawling empire and a thriving society. One thing that they lacked, however, was a system of writing. Nowadays we must piece together what we can about their society based on artifacts, monuments, and of course, the traces of their spoken language that have not completely died out.

Beyond preserving culture and using language as a part of the speakers' identity, there's a very practical reason for wanting to save a dying language: ease of translation. Archaeologists and anthropologists can glean a wealth of information about a society from its language. If a language dies out, so does our access to direct knowledge about its customs, folk tales, and vocabulary for describing the world and that culture's perceived place in it.

But dying languages can prove valuable to more than just academic researchers. Even popular culture can benefit. For example, the films "The Passion of the Christ" and "Apocalypto" relied on ancient language for their dialogue. In the cases of getting the dialects for Aramaic and Mayan, the filmmakers had to turn to the few communities where

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