this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but that number is shrinking. Unesco estimates that half could disappear by the end of the century. So how are languages lost, and what does that mean for the people who speak them?

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 30 points 1 week ago (11 children)

So how are languages lost, and what does that mean for the people who speak them?

If the language stops being spoken then there are no people who speak them, and asking what something means for those nonexistent people is kind of weird.

I'm thinking that the loss of distinct languages in active use is not necessarily a bad thing overall. It means more people can communicate with each other more widely. By all means document these disappearing languages as much as possible before they're gone, but there's likely a good reason most of them are disappearing.

[–] nyamlae@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

there's likely a good reason most of them are disappearing.

This belief is called the "just world fallacy". Sadly, the world is not just.

Most of these languages are disappearing due to colonialism. People's traditional ways of living have been forcibly upended by capitalists and state governments, who have seized the commons around the world, and by colonialist policies such as residential schools. No longer able to support themselves using their traditional ways of living, people have been mde into wage slaves who must compete on the market to survive. That means using English or another widely-spoken language. Indigenous languages are much less useful to capitalists, and so gradually they wither and die.

We are at risk of killing 95% of the world's languages, on top of the incalculable cultural damage that goes along with all of this, just to prop up a single way of being: liberal nation states. It is reprehensible beyond words.

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