Why Language Loss Is a Global Crisis

When you think about endangered species, you probably picture animals like tigers or sea turtles. But what about endangered languages?

Right now, about 7,000 languages are spoken around the world, but one language dies every two weeks. That means by the end of this century, more than half of all the languages spoken today might be completely gone. This is a human crisis and a huge loss for anthropology.

A language isn’t just a way to talk. It’s kind of a way to see the world. When a language disappears, we don’t just lose words, we lose stories, traditions, knowledge, and identity. Let’s think about it: language shapes how people think, remember, and relate to their environment. Many endangered languages contain knowledge about ecosystems, plants, and medicine that has been passed down for thousands of years, but is barely written down most of the time.

For example, many Indigenous languages in the Amazon hold information about plants that scientists are only starting to understand. When the people who speak those languages die without passing them on, that knowledge is lost.

For many communities, language is tied to who they are. Imagine growing up hearing your grandparents speak a language that you’re not taught in school and slowly watching that language fade away as fewer people speak it. That’s the reality for a lot of young kids around the world. Language loss can create a disconnection between generations.

Anthropologists say that language is one of the core elements of culture, and when it’s gone, it can never truly be replaced.

The diversity of languages is part of the diversity of humanity. Just like we care about protecting rainforests or endangered animals, we should care about protecting the world’s diversity in languages. Language loss isn’t just happening in places far away, it’s happening in the U.S. too, especially among Native American communities.

Language shapes history. Without it, we can’t preserve oral histories, songs, or beliefs that were never written down. Every lost language is a lost perspective on a human’s experience.