Language death

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The process by which a speech community stops transmitting its language to children, and the reason the family tree of the world is being pruned faster than it is being described. Death is rarely sudden. The usual sequence is a shift to a dominant language in public domains — administration, schooling, employment, media — followed by a generation that understands the ancestral language but does not speak it, followed by a last generation of fluent speakers whose peers have died. Because the causes are economic and institutional rather than linguistic, vulnerability tracks speaker numbers and political weight rather than any property of the languages themselves. UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, in its third edition of 2010, listed roughly two and a half thousand languages as endangered in some degree, and the United Nations proclaimed an International Decade of Indigenous Languages running from 2022 to 2032 in response to the trend. For this Journey the consequence is specific rather than sentimental: every language that dies undescribed removes evidence that the comparative method needs, and each death of a last relative manufactures a new isolate.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.