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Linguist Jonathan Bobaljik, an expert on the nearly extinct language Itelmen, says up to 90 percent of the world’s languages could vanish in the next 100 years.
Jonathan Bobaljik, professor of Linguistics, researches a language known as Itelmen, a disappearing language. Roughly 30 remaining individuals living in an area of Kamchatka, Russia speak the language. Photo by Frank Dahlmeyer UConn/Photo
Jonathan Bobaljik, professor of linguistics, researches a language known as Itelmen, spoken by only about 30 remaining individuals living in Kamchatka, Russia. (Frank Dahlmeyer/UConn Photo)
Why study a vanishing language? Jonathan Bobaljik, professor of linguistics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, says scientists want to document languages to learn more about their diversity and the patterns that are surprisingly common to all, and their implications for human cognition.
Of the world’s 7,000 or so languages, he says, between 50 percent and 90 percent are in danger of extinction in the next 100 years.
“We go out literally to the ends of the earth and try to document languages as different as possible, to see if the patterns that we are familiar with are in these far-flung languages,” says Bobaljik, whose research is funded by the National Science Foundation. “We need to document this rich variety as quickly as possible, before it disappears.”
