There are over 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today. Each one is a living archive- a vessel of memory, landscape, rhythm, and ritual. And yet, by the end of this century, more than half may fall silent forever. A language disappears roughly every two weeks. Not with the fanfare of war or the spectacle of fire, but quietly, invisibly.
This is not just a crisis of communication. It is a slow erasure of the human imagination.
Language is not merely a tool we use to describe the world. It is the framework through which we perceive it. In some Indigenous Australian languages, there are no words for “left” or “right”- only cardinal directions. In certain tongues, time flows from east to west, like the sun. In others, it comes from behind and moves forward through memory. Grammar shapes not just how we speak, but how we think. What we cannot name, we cannot hold. And what we cannot imagine, we slowly forget how to feel it.
Every language carries within it words that are untranslatable- not just because they are rare, but because they are rooted in a specific way of life. Icelandic has a word: gluggaveður, for weather that is beautiful to look at through a window but miserable to actually go out in. In Yaghan, a nearly extinct language of Tierra del Fuego, there's mamihlapinatapai- “a look shared by two people, each wishing the other would initiate something they both desire but neither wants to begin.” In Italian there is a word abbiocco- the drowsy, warm sleepiness that settles in after a satisfying meal. It's a word that evokes fullness, comfort, a kind of edible serenity. You don’t just eat in Italian- you live the moment after.
And then there are languages that are musical in themselves- melodic, rhythmic, almost danced like Brazilian Portuguese. The way it moves- rising and falling like waves or samba- makes people sway, smile, loosen. Some languages feel like singing even when spoken. They carry not just information, but joy. Other languages, like Italian, are fast, expressive, and physical. And English- it can be coldly logical, the language of science and law. But it’s also the language of Shakespeare, of poetry, and songwriting. It doesn’t always give you the words for your feelings- but it's like a toolbox, that makes you to build your own.
People who speak multiple languages often describe themselves as feeling like a different person in each one. It’s not just vocabulary that shifts- it’s posture, tone, even values. A study by Susan Ervin-Tripp at UC Berkeley showed that bilingual individuals told different versions of the same story depending on the language they used. Other research has found that language can influence levels of extroversion, assertiveness, even memory recall. In French, someone may feel poetic and soft; in Spanish, bold and musical; in English, concise and direct. For the multilingual, each language is a different lens- and sometimes, a different self. Speaking another language is not just switching codes. It’s switching worlds.
When a language dies, so do the moods they name. And with them, entire ways of life.
Globalization, for all its promises of connection, has become a flattening force. Dominant languages- English, Mandarin, Spanish- surge forward with economic and technological might, while smaller tongues retreat into silence. The dialects spoken by shepherds, midwives, fishermen, grandmothers- all slowly overwritten by the cold efficiency of the global marketplace. Children grow up learning the language of airports and apps, but not the one their ancestors whispered to the earth.
Some families stop teaching the old language not out of shame, but love- believing fluency in a major tongue will protect their children, offer them opportunity, mobility, respect. And perhaps it does. But what is gained comes at a cost: the soft death of a memoryscape, an ancestral logic, a rhythm of breath that once belonged only to that place, that people, that soil.
This is not nostalgia. This is extinction. And with every extinction, the world becomes narrower, dimmer, simpler- less able to hold the full complexity of human thought.
What if the last speaker of a language dies before we ever hear the word they used for love- or for grief, or dawn, or the silence between two waves?
What if entire cosmologies vanish before we even know they existed?
What if we are not just losing languages, but losing the very ability to imagine who else we could have been?
That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet… Maybe not
On language, perception, and the quiet extinction of human worlds
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