Somewhere on the planet right now, somebody is the last living person who can tell a particular joke and have it land.

The punchline runs on a word that exists in exactly one language, and that language is down to one speaker. When she goes, the joke does not get translated. It simply stops being funny, permanently, because there is nobody left to be funny at.

Counting the silences

How fast this is happening depends on who is doing the counting, and the gap between estimates is wider than the headline figure suggests. UN Human Rights has repeated the widely cited linguists’ estimate of one language going extinct every two weeks. Lyle Campbell and his team at the Catalogue of Endangered Languages did something slightly different: instead of projecting forward, they counted languages already known to have gone quiet, and arrived at roughly one every three months, as documented by the Rosetta Project. Campbell’s own summary of the slower number was that it remains shocking enough.

The direction of travel is not in dispute. Ethnologue, the reference catalogue maintained by SIL International, currently classifies about 44 per cent of the world’s living languages as endangered, meaning children in those communities are no longer picking them up. Writing in National Geographic, Nina Strochlic noted that UNESCO’s atlas recorded 230 languages going extinct between 1950 and 2010 alone.

Vocabulary is the part everyone pictures. It is also the smallest part of the loss.

A word for a shared look

Yaghan was spoken at the very bottom of South America, in the wet, wind-flogged channels of Tierra del Fuego. Its most famous word is mamihlapinatapai, glossed by the nineteenth century missionary Thomas Bridges as the look passed between two people who both want something to happen and neither wants to be the one to start it. Every reader has been in that exact moment. Almost no language has bothered to name it.

Cristina Calderón, known to her community as Abuela Cristina, was the last native speaker. She died in February 2022 at 93, spending her final decades making reed baskets and passing on what she could, as reported by NPR. Yaghan had no written form until people started writing it down specifically because it was ending.

The pharmacy nobody wrote down

A missing word for a feeling is wistful. A missing word for a plant that treats a fever is a body count.

Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and Jordi Bascompte at the University of Zurich pulled together three big ethnobotanical datasets covering North America, northwest Amazonia and New Guinea: 3,597 medicinal plant species, 12,495 recorded uses, 236 indigenous languages. In a paper published in PNAS in 2021, they found that more than 75 per cent of those medicinal uses were known to a single language and nowhere else. Of the plants in the study that actually carry a conservation assessment, only a small share count as threatened, somewhere between one and four per cent depending on the region. Most of the medicinal flora in the dataset has never been formally assessed at all, a gap the authors themselves flagged as urgent. The languages holding the knowledge are the ones actually at risk.

That is one study covering three regions, not a global census, and the authors say plainly that the figures will shift as more communities are documented. Even so, the structure it describes is unnerving. Knowledge that looks redundant, held in dozens of places, turns out to be held in one.

Where the compass lives

Some languages store knowledge no one else has. A few run on different machinery altogether.

Guugu Yimithirr, spoken around Hope Vale in far north Queensland, has no everyday word for left or right. Position gets described with cardinal directions instead, so the cup sits on the western side of the table and the ant is walking up your southern leg. Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics tested what that does to a person. Writing in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, he reported speakers pointing towards distant locations with an average error of about 13 degrees, in unfamiliar terrain, without apparent effort. Speaking the language at all requires knowing which way is north, always, the way an English speaker always knows which hand is which.

Roughly 800 people reported speaking it at the 2021 Australian census, most of them adults.

Waking one up

What happens when a language falls silent and somebody wants it back anyway? Daryl Baldwin, a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, was working as a carpenter in his late twenties when his father handed him a folder of his grandfather’s papers. Tucked inside, Miami University later recounted, were eighteen pages of vocabulary typed on onionskin: Myaamia, a language whose last fluent speaker had died decades earlier. Baldwin went back to school for linguistics so he could read the archival material properly, then home-schooled his own children in the language.

Baldwin’s own children grew up speaking Myaamia well enough to teach it at summer camps, and he has said he has caught them talking in their sleep in the language, Smithsonian magazine reported. He earned a MacArthur fellowship for the work in 2016.

His warning is the interesting part, though. A language that stops evolving, he has argued, stops being worth speaking. That puts a slightly awkward edge on the whole documentation project. Recordings, dictionaries and grammars are worth every hour poured into them, but they preserve a language roughly the way a museum preserves a horse. What actually keeps one alive is far less dignified: somebody using it to complain about the weather, to gossip, to argue over nothing, to swear at a dropped pot.