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Chasing Lost Languages

Author Laura Spinney on the 3 greatest revelations she had while writing Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

And because writing was only invented about 5,000 years ago, the vast majority of those half a million languages are lost to us, having been spoken in a preliterate world and died before they could be recorded. That’s half a million distinct systems of knowledge including histories, myths, songs, pharmacopoeias, recipes, jokes, prayers, and swear words that have vanished into oblivion. It means that living languages likely represent less than 2 percent of humanity’s full linguistic range, and a non-random sample at that—one heavily shaped, for example, by Western imperialism.

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