The Death of Languages

"@$%%^^^" I don't speak those languages. In fact, very few people do. They're used only by a handful of people, and all those languages are in danger of extinction.

"@$%%^^^"——我不会说这些语言。事实上，会说的人极少。它们只被一小撮人使用，而所有这些语言都面临着灭绝的危险。

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, but about one-third of those have fewer than 1,000 speakers. And according to UNESCO, more than 40% of those languages are in danger of extinction. In fact, every fortnight, one of the world's languages disappears forever.

当今世界有超过 7,000 种语言，但其中约三分之一的使用者不到 1,000 人。根据联合国教科文组织的数据，超过 40% 的语言正面临灭绝的危险。事实上，每两周就有一种语言永远地消失。

When you say 'dead language', many people think of Latin. But Latin actually never died. It's been spoken continuously since the time of the Caesars, but it changed very gradually over 2,000 years until it became French, Spanish, and other Romance languages.

说到"死语言"，许多人会想到拉丁语。但拉丁语其实从未真正死去。自凯撒时代以来它就被持续地使用，只是在两千年里逐渐演变成了法语、西班牙语和其他罗曼语系语言。

True language death happens when communities switched to other languages and parents stopped raising their children to speak their old ones. When the last elderly speaker dies, the language is unlikely ever to be spoken fluently again.

真正意义上的语言消亡发生在社区转向其他语言、父母不再让孩子学习祖辈语言的时候。当最后一位年长使用者去世时，这种语言便几乎再也无法被流利地说出。

If you look at this chart, which measures the world's languages in terms of their size and their state of health, you can see that most languages are ranked in the middle. English, like just a few other dominant languages, is up at the top left-hand corner. It's in a really strong state. But if your language is down here in the bottom right-hand corner of the graph, like Haipuluo from Indonesia or Guató from Brazil, you are in serious trouble.

如果你看这张图表——它从语言的规模和健康状态两个角度来衡量世界上的语言——你会发现大多数语言都排在中间。英语和少数几种主导语言一起位于左上角，处于非常强势的状态。但如果你的语言落在图表的右下角，比如印度尼西亚的 Haipuluo 或者巴西的 Guató，那就麻烦大了。

In the bad old days, governments just banned languages they didn't like. But sometimes the pressure is more subtle. Any teenager growing up in the Soviet Union soon realized that whatever language you spoke at home, mastering Russian was going to be the key to success. Citizens of China, including Tibetans as well as speakers of Shanghainese or Cantonese, face similar pressure today to focus on Mandarin.

在过去那些糟糕的年代，政府会直接禁止他们不喜欢的语言。但有时这种压力更加微妙。任何在前苏联长大的少年很快就明白：无论你在家里说什么语言，掌握俄语才是通往成功的钥匙。今天，中国的公民——包括藏族人、上海话或粤语的使用者——也面临着类似的压力，需要把重心放在普通话上。

Just one language has ever come back from the dead: Hebrew. It was extinct for two millennia, but Jewish settlers to Palestine in the early 20th centuries spoke different languages back in Europe, and they adopted Hebrew on their arrival as their common language. It became Israel's official language when the country was fully established in 1948 and now has seven million speakers.

只有一种语言曾经从死亡中复活过：希伯来语。它已经灭绝了两千年，但 20 世纪初前往巴勒斯坦的犹太定居者在欧洲讲着不同的语言，他们到达后采用希伯来语作为共同语言。1948 年以色列正式建国时，希伯来语成为官方语言，如今已有七百万使用者。

Now, Hebrew is the world's only fully revived language, but others are trying. Cornish, spoken in southwestern England, died out two centuries ago, but today there are several hundred speakers of the revived language.

希伯来语是世界上唯一被完全复兴的语言，但其他语言也在努力。两个世纪前消失的康沃尔语（Cornish，英国西南部使用），如今复兴版本已经有几百名使用者。

Practicality aside, human diversity is a good thing in its own right. Imagine going on an exciting holiday only to find that the food, clothing, buildings, the people and, yes, the language was just the same as back home. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it well: "Every language is a temple in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined." Moving that soul of the people from a temple into a museum just isn't the same thing.

抛开实用性不谈，人类的多样性本身就是一件好事。想象一下，你兴致勃勃地出门度假，却发现那里的食物、衣着、建筑、人，甚至语言都和家里一模一样。正如奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯所言："每一种语言都是一座庙宇，使用它的人的灵魂被供奉其中。"把那份灵魂从庙宇搬进博物馆，意义完全不同。