Why saving languages is important

For millennia languages have evolved and changed, morphed into something completely different and some have even gone extinct, or practically, see root language: latin. There are over 7,000 languages spoken on earth today, but that number is rapidly decreasing. K. David Harrison, a professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College and author of the book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge is on a quest to stop this massive upheaval of knowledge, fearing thoughts and ideas will become lost in translation. Harrison's research focuses primarily on those endangered languages and many undocumented or only mildly documented languages. And now he's come up with the notion of "language hotspots," which are places in the world where a vast variety of endangered languages coexist along with the knowledge of that culture.

Harrison points out Siberia, Bolivia and Oklahoma as three of the many language heavy places on earth from languages in North America's Northwest Pacific Plateau to those in Eastern Africa. But the real fear Harrison has in languages seemingly evaporating into thin air, is not the actual language themselves, but what they represent and the knowledge that coincides with them. Rarely can one translate precisely everything from one language to another, and with that percentage of untranslated words goes a culture and its roots. Now more than ever Harrison is promoting language diversity and hopes the world will remain multilingual. "Nearly half of the world's languages are endangered and may vanish in this century," says Harrison on his website.

"The loss to science, to humanity and to the native communities themselves will be catastrophic."

Check out more about K. David Harrison and his book "When Languages Die" here.