Endangered Languages and the Tower of Babel

This week we read the story of Noah, and then we read about the Tower of Babel. You may recall the end of the story in Genesis 11:Is It Me: Or does the Tower of Babel look a lot like the Leaning Tower of Piza?

6And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

So we’re all scattered around speaking different languages. Actually, though, language diversity is shrinking every day. Some estimates say that over 90% of the languages spoken today will die out by the end of century. It may not sound like such a travesty, but if you think about all of the hard data that it’s in any languages, as well as the nuance and cadences that’s so important and different in every language, it’s a really depressing statistic. Most of the languages that are dying these days are languages and dialects spoken by small rural groups. In Australia, scientists are struggling to work with Aboriginal people to identify various species of birds and insects that have long been named in Aboriginal languages, but are not yet scientifically classified.

I come from a family of linguists, and we’re serious about recording and learning endangered languages. These languages, by the way, include both Yiddish and Ladino.

To find out more about endangered languages, and to donate money to linguists and social scientists who work to preserve dying languages, check out the Society for Endangered Languages (fyi, some of the site is in German) and the Foundation for Endangered Languages. I also recommend Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley, with an awesome chapter on the Yiddish revival, and the National Geographic Enduring Voices project.

Note to self: Build modern day Tower of Babel→save Ladino?