A natural process—to an extent

A. Languages have died throughout time, when their speakers are exterminated or, more frequently, subordinated by a more powerful group and switch to the new group’s language. We have seen Hittite and Tocharian as dead Indo-European languages. There are dozens of such languages known in the Eurasian region alone.

B. The process accelerated with the development of agriculture and the Neolithic revolution. Before this, humans existed in hunter-gatherer groups, possibly speaking tens of thousands of languages. But agriculture creates food surpluses that increase population and encourage migrations and subjugation of other groups. As a result, migrators’ languages tend to extinguish the ones they encounter.

C. But the process is occurring today at a vastly accelerated rate. Ninety-six percent of the world’s people speak one of the 20 most spoken languages (Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, French, Punjabi, Javanese, Bihari, Italian, Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, and Vietnamese). According to one estimate, 90 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages will be extinct by 2100.

D. For example, there were about 300 languages spoken in the continental United States four centuries ago. Today, a third of them are spoken by no one, and of the remaining two-thirds, only a handful are being passed on to new generations, while all the rest are spoken only by very old people and will be dead within a decade.