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You鈥檝e travelled the world chasing dying languages. Why?

Language diversity is an insurance against the extinction of ideas and knowledge. Ancient languages, like those of Indigenous Australians or Papua New Guineans, are an irreplaceable record of sustainable human living. These cultures have immense knowledge about plants and ecosystems, different ways of thinking. When you lose their languages, you鈥檙e losing concepts that have been refined over millennia.

What pushes a language to extinction?

It is not number of speakers that predicts language vitality, it鈥檚 the transmission rate. The largest Native American language is Navajo, with 50,000 speakers. But transmission rate is only 15 per cent.

The problem comes from an attitude, held both by dominant and minority language speakers, that small languages are backwards, obsolete, deficient in some way. I have worked in many communities where this attitude has taken hold. People abandon their language in despair. The last generation of people in a community who grow up speaking a language have a great sense of regret that this has happened.

These scenarios where you know the language is going to die are really sad. I鈥檝e moved into a different area.

What are you focusing on now?

I鈥檓 working with small languages that still have speakers of all ages. Communities that are pushing back against the hegemony of big languages in clever ways. Papua New Guinea has the lion鈥檚 share of the world鈥檚 linguistic diversity 鈥� a lot of small and medium-sized languages that are not at risk. People might learn between five and 10 of them. There are intangible factors that keep these languages alive. An attitude of linguistic superiority 鈥� our language is the most beautiful or complicated language in the world 鈥� will help, for instance.

The Yokoim language has about 1200 speakers in three villages. It鈥檚 threatened because children go to school with other ethnic groups and speak Tok Pisin. But it has a few charismatic individuals, like . That鈥檚 an astonishing thing if you think about it: children are abandoning the language, and here you have this person doing something creative with it.

Or take Siletz Dee-Ni, a Native American language. It has one fluent speaker and a handful of learners. But they鈥檙e actively inventing new words for their language. They might, for instance, invent a word that means 鈥渂rain in a box鈥� instead of adopting 鈥渃omputer鈥�.

So it is possible to save languages?

I think so. Biologists believe in storing live specimens to record and save biodiversity. You can do something similar for languages with the internet. In 2009, I visited Kundiman village, where they speak Yokoim. We made recordings and built . They recorded stories and songs that are on YouTube now, and I鈥檓 recording them talking about their knowledge of plants. When I first visited, they had only heard about the internet 鈥� never used it. Now, their language has a presence online.

We鈥檝e had requests from other offline Papuan communities to do the same. For several of them, their language is their first online presence. And when they do get the internet, they hear the voices of their elders speaking their languages. Think about those Papuans becoming computer programmers and technologists, and the diversity of thinking they could bring to that work.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淪aving endangered languages鈥�

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