I’m not the first person to attempt to answer this question. Like many of those who have tried before me, I am far from being an authority on language and culture. However, because this question seems to come into style every time the BBC or the New York Times publish reports on how the last speaker of a remote language has died, and because each time it does it sparks a very poor and biased debate, I felt compelled to speak out in defense of dying languages. Many of my counterparts have tried to convince us that dying languages are not an issue that should concern us. It’s just the way things are. Like everything else on Earth, languages complete a cycle and then fade away. I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to that, but I can’t help thinking there is a bigger picture we are failing to see when it comes to this question.

According to Ethnologue, an encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages, “52% of languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people; 28% are spoken by fewer than 1,000; and 83% are spoken only in single countries, and so are particularly exposed to the policies of a single government.” This is where the question truly lies: language and culture and how that translates into language and law, and ultimately, language and government.

In their analysis of this data, the Foundation for Endangered Languages tells us the following:

“At the other end of the scale, 10 major languages, each spoken by over 109 million people, are the mother tongues of almost half of the world’s population.”

If we part from theories that analyze the intricate relationship between language and thought or language and reason, what these numbers are telling us is that when languages die, they take with them the potential for other forms of human reasoning.

The question of language and rational thought has been haunting some of the brightest minds in human history for as long as we can remember. It can be dated at least as far back as Greece and the ancient Greek concept of logos; a term that today is casually translated as “word” and which derives from legō, meaning “to count, tell, say, speak.” The Greeks distinguished between logos prophorikos (the uttered word) and the logos endiathetos (the word remaining within) but it was Heraclitus who provided true insight as to the ungraspable meaning of logos, which provided a link between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure. Heraclitus was a firm believer that man cannot and never will fully understand the logos that is always present in every word.

In Ars Rhetorica, Aristotle studied the concept of logos and defined it as argument from reason and included it as one of the three modes of persuasion (the other two modes being pathos, persuasion by means of emotional appeal and ethos, persuasion through convincing listeners of one’s moral character):

“For Aristotle, logos is something more refined than the capacity to make private feelings public: it enables the human being to perform as no other animal can; it makes it possible for him to perceive and make clear to others through reasoned discourse the difference between what is advantageous and what is harmful, between what is just and what is unjust, and between what is good and what is evil.” (Paul Anthony Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume I: The Ancien Régime in Classical Greece, University of North Carolina Press, 1994.)

Therefore, logos is the way in which we express our ideas and thoughts about what is just and what is not. Logos, words, are the way in which we shape our rational world, the foundations of civil society. But some would argue that logos is much more than that. Phenominologists such as Merleau-Ponty might argue that words are a critical part of the role perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Others, like Paul Ricoeur, would take that a step further and sustain that whatever is intelligible is accessible to man in and through language and all deployments of language:

“there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.” (Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (The Terry Lectures Series), Northwestern University Press, 1991.)

So if language can shape the way in which we perceive and interact with the world, while framing the way in which we, as rational beings define and construct ourselves and our societies; and if over half of the world’s population speaks the same 10 languages, then wouldn’t it be safe to say that the fewer languages we have, the more limited our possible rational tools for building our future societies? When nearly half of the people on Earth share the same languages and thus the same mindsets, is there room for diversity and deliberation? If the answer is no, and considering that we view ourselves as a species that evolves through rational thought and communicates through rational discourse, would it be safe to conclude that although the death of a single language will not affect our daily life in any way whatsoever each time a language dies we lose the potential mindset that died with it?  If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then the death of a language is indeed tragic and something we should strive to prevent; and if language shapes society (and in turn, law), then perhaps it’s time to look to the law to find a solution to the problem of dying languages.