Language Log

"How the World's Largest Language Family Spread – and Why Others Go Extinct." Robinson, Andrew. Nature 641, no. 8061 (April 28, 2025): 31-33.

This is a review of the following three books:

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
Laura Spinney (William Collins 2025)

The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting their Story
J. P. Mallory (Thames & Hudson 2025)

Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of HiddenLanguages
Lorna Gibb (Atlantic 2025)

Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, an associate professor of linguistics at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, called my attention to this article he wrote for The Conversation (1/26/25), "Finding ‘Kape’: How Language Documentation helps us preserve an endangered language". He and his research team are currently doing intensive fieldwork on the languages of the remote Indonesian island of Alor, which lies northeast of Timor-Leste.  Their purpose is to document and preserve endangered languages.  Among the endangered languages they have discovered and first documented is Kape, which I will discuss in more detail below.

Listen for yourself:

One Man’s Mission to Revive an Indigenous Language in Argentina

This Language Was Long Believed Extinct. Then One Man Spoke Up. 

Blas Jaime has spent nearly two decades resurrecting Chaná, an Indigenous language in Argentina that he learned from his mother. Blas Omar Jaime has, in many ways, placed the Chaná Indigenous group back on the map.

NYT (1/13/24), by Natalie Alcoba; Photographs and Video by Sebastián López Brach

To revive a half-dead language is not an easy task.

As a boy, Blas Omar Jaime spent many afternoons learning about his ancestors. Over yerba mate and torta fritas, his mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, passed along the knowledge she had stored in Chaná, a throaty language spoken by barely moving the lips or tongue.

There are many things about Papua New Guinea (PNG) that make it unique (the abundance of its flora and fauna, its ritualistic cannibalism, its political complexity, etc.), but above all for me is the huge number of its languages, especially considering its relatively small population on such a large amount of land (see below for some details).

Papua New Guinea (abbreviated PNG; /ˈpæp(j)uə … ˈɡɪni, ˈpɑː-/ ^ⓘ, also US: /ˈpɑːpwə-, ˈpɑːp(j)ə-/^[12]) is a country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and its offshore islands in Melanesia (a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean north of Australia). Officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea (Tok Pisin: Independen Stet bilong Papua Niugini; Hiri Motu: Independen Stet bilong Papua Niu Gini), it shares its only land border with Indonesia to the west and it is directly adjacent to Australia to the south and the Solomon Islands to the east. Its capital, located along its southeastern coast, is Port Moresby. The country is the world's third largest island country, with an area of 462,840 km² (178,700 sq mi).

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-thirty-seventh issue:

“Tocharian Bilingualism, Language Shift, and Language Death in the Old Turkic Context,” by Hakan Aydemir.

pdf

ABSTRACT

The death of a language is a sad and dramatic event. It is, however, a fact that many languages died out in the past and are now dying out as well. However, although we often know the time and causes of present or recent language deaths and have a relatively large amount of information about them, we often do not know the time and causes of past language deaths, or our knowledge of these processes is very limited. In other words, the very limited written sources or linguistic material make it very difficult to study “language shift” or “language death” phenomena in historical periods.

From The Japan Times:

A foray into the realm of Japanese ‘dead words’

Trendy buzzwords tend to be most at risk of dying out as they often reflect ideas and trends that are fleeting.

By Tadasu Takahashi
Staff writer
 
Oct 31, 2023

Sometimes whole languages go extinct, more often certain words within languages cease to exist as part of the living lexicon.  There are political, demographic, and other socioeconomic reasons why languages disappear.  The reasons why individual words die out are related more to fashion — in culture, science, and similar emotional and intellectual reasons.

Tadasu Takahashi's interesting article provides some specific examples from contemporary Japanese language.

Recent article in Scientific American:

This Ancient Language Has the Only Grammar Based Entirely on the Human Body

An endangered language family suggests that early humans used their bodies as a model for reality

By Anvita Abbi on June 1, 2023

From just a small handful of Andaman Islanders, the last speakers of their languages, Anvita Abbi was able to piece together what she believes to be the basic principles of their grammar.  What she found was astonishing.  Keep your antennae up and out, however, because her article begins with the much debunked story of how thousands of the indigenous people escaped death when the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004 struck their islands by relying on the deep, autochthonous knowledge bequeathed by their ancestors, although she does not directly attribute their actions to the grammatical features of their language as many popularizers had done at the time of the disaster (see "Selected readings" below), but rather, more sophisticatedly, to the wisdom transmitted over thousands of generations through their mother tongue.

…

A language embodies a worldview and, like a civilization, changes and grows in layers. Words or phrases that are frequently used morph into ever more abstract and compressed grammatical forms. For instance, the suffix “-ed,” signifying the past tense in modern English, originated in “did” (that is, “did use” became “used”); Old English's in steed and on gemong became “instead” and “among,” respectively. These kinds of transitions make historical linguistics rather like archaeology. Just as an archaeologist carefully excavates a mound to reveal different epochs of a city-state stacked on one another, so can a linguist separate the layers of a language to uncover the stages of its evolution.

…

During the past few weeks, we've looked at the throttling of Cantonese in Hong Kong.  Now, far to the north of the Chinese empire, the CCP is ramping up the war against Mongolian:

Inner Mongolia: China accused of 'cultural genocide' for school language shift

Debi Edward, ITV News (9/1/23)

—-

Inner Mongolia is the latest province in China where ethnic minorities have had their language forcefully phased out from the education system.

At the school drop-off point, we visited in the capital, Hohhot, nothing appeared to have changed.

We saw children waved off by their parents, some speaking in their native Mongolian language.

But from the start of this school year children from nursery to senior school will find all lessons conducted in Chinese.

How many are there?

Taiwan’s unrecognized indigenous tribes are reviving dead languages to achieve recognition

There are currently 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples in Taiwan. The Pingpu — which comprise 10 groups on the island’s lowlands — are lobbying to make that number 17, and they’re doing it by reviving lost languages and culture.

By Jordyn Haime, The China Project (6/5/23)

In contemporary Mandarin, many of the speakers of these languages are called shāndì tóngbāo 山地同胞 ("mountain countrymen / compatriots"), which meshes well with the opening paragraph of Haime's article:

Long before Chinese settlers came to the flat, sprawling lands of the Pingtung plain — the southern Taiwanese county now known for its pineapple and mango production — the area was inhabited by Pingpu (plains indigenous) tribes like the Makatao. Waves of colonization pushed indigenous tribes from their ancestral lands and closer to the mountains, or in some cases, to the other side of the island.

From karts deffle:

Regular readers of Language Log will not be strangers to Sogdian, an extinct Middle Iranian language (see the list of "Selected readings" below).  The pace of research on Sogdian has picked up greatly in recent decades.  Now, with the publication of Catalogue of Sogdian Writings in Central Asia by International Institute for Central Asian Studies (IICAS) in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, we are set for even more intensive studies on Sogdian in the coming years.

I've always pronounced it as rhyming with "thanks", but Wiktionary makes it sound more like "monks" in German, Dutch, and UK English.

"Manx" is the English exonym for the language whose endonym "is Gaelg/Gailck, which shares the same etymology as the word 'Gaelic', as do the endonyms of its sister languages Irish (Gaeilge; Gaoluinn, Gaedhlag and Gaeilic) and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig)." (source)

Manx (or Manx Gaelic) was declared extinct as a first language in 1974 with the death of Ned Maddrell, but then achieved the remarkable feat of revival.  Since the topic of language extinction / survival / revival came up recently (see "Selected readings" below), I was especially drawn to this newspaper report:

An Ancient Language, Once on the Brink, Is a British Isle’s Talk of the Town

After being nearly silenced, Manx is experiencing a revival on the Isle of Man, thanks in part to an elementary school and some impassioned parents.

By Megan Specia, NYT (Nov. 24, 2022)