Language Death Day

Originally posted Friday, October 5, 2007 at 2:27pm

This Sunday, October 7, is the day I have selected to commemorate all of the human languages that have been lost to the ravages of time. There are somewhere around 6000 languages in the world, and probably over half of them will be gone in fifty years. It is not possible to keep all of these languages alive, and even if it were it would not be practical. Language death is a fact of life, yet nevertheless we lose something when we lose a language. A language tells us something about how the mind works and how languages evolve and have evolved. A language is a part of someone's culture.

October 7, 1992 is the day the last fluent speaker of Ubykh, Tevfik Esenç, died in his sleep. Ubykh was a Northwest Caucasian language with an incredibly complex and interesting sound-system. It had as many consonant phonemes as almost any other language, yet only two vowel phonemes.

Here is a short recording of Tevfik Esenç speaking Ubykh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRj-8oCmnkU