It’s time to add languages to the endangered list. Experts predict that in the next century 90 percent of the world’s languages will be extinct.There are currently 5,000 to 7,000 spokn languages. Of these languages, 4,000 to 5,000 are classified as indigenous. With the extinction of these languages, not only does the world’s linguistic diversity suffer, so does its cultural diversity. Thousands of traditions disappear as cultures are swallowed and forced to speak one of the “mega-languages.”

Professor of Spanish Maritza Almeida does not think the projections are accurate. “The pride of the people will keep the language,” she said. She acknowledged that more remote languages might be lost forever but she had faith that people will continue speaking their languages.

As globalization spreads, however, the fate of indigenous languages grows more uncertain. Senior Samantha Thompson, a sociology and anthropology major, thinks “eventually there may be only a handful of spoken languages, but not in the near future.”

Thompson also believes people can retain much of their culture even after their language is lost.

Graham Dutfield of the Oxford Center for the Environment, Ethics, and Society said, “Languages are repositories of vast systems of knowledge. When a language dies, we do not know how much we are losing with it.”

Vernie Davis, professor of anthropology, compared the losing of a language to “extinct plants and animals that may have provided the basic components for many of our medicines.
“It limits us,” Davis added.

Many of the world’s languages have disappeared as a result of conquerors, colonizers, and dictators. Now the pressure to assimilate has never before been stronger, giving hundreds of languages a future as certain as a turtle on its back.