Emphasis Preaching Journal

In his book, Language in Danger: How Language Loss Threatens Our Future, linguist Andrew Dalby warns that many human languages are in danger of becoming extinct. He estimates that by the end of the century, about half of the existing 5,000 or more languages will be extinct, an extinction rate of about one language every two weeks. Some of the reasons for this threat to languages are rather obvious: colonization, subjugation, invasion, economic pressures from the dominant language group, even government enforcement against certain languages.

Dalby argues that along with culture and diversity, one of the most serious losses that the world faces in losing these languages is that with them we also lose certain ways of looking at the world. For example, much knowledge about such topics as herbal medicine comes to us through languages that are dying. If and when those languages are gone, so will the knowledge that they impart.

Dalby makes a further sobering assertion: with few exceptions, Hebrew being one, once a language is dead, almost nothing will be able to resurrect it; it is lost forever.

The God who created all languages at Babel, honored their existence by having the disciples speak in the many tongues of the people, rather than having the people all hearing one language.