There are about 7,000 natural languages spoken in the world today. On present trends, 90 per cent of them will be extinct within 200 years. Language death is an irrevocable cultural loss, just as species extinction is a blow to biodiversity; but a £20 million linguistics project is helping to counter it.
The endangered languages documentation programme run by the School of African and Oriental Studies at the University of London has preserved records of some 400 minority languages, and hopes to save 3,500 others that are at long-term risk. The scheme is the beneficiary of funding from Arcadia, a charity established by Lisbet Rausing from money that she inherited from her family’s invention of Tetra Pak cartons.
Language is uniquely human. By combining sounds