From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter.
Today, I want to discuss a rather sensitive issue.
This is not going to be a gloomy thing,
but I want to address the issue of language revival in a way that reflects the sorts of things that I've been thinking lately.
And our theme.
What causes concern about all of these things is what's called language death.
You're always listening to me talking about the 7,000 languages in the world,
and the truth is that we're on our way to possibly only having a few hundred languages actually being passed on to children in the world.
The vast array of languages in the world are under the same kind of threat as flora and fauna are.
It's one thing for me to give some list of languages in some part of the world, but to the linguist,
that list is of languages that possibly are and often probably are threatened,
that won't be around in a grievously short time.
Most languages, or at least half of the world's languages, are under that kind of threat.
And so language revival attempts to reverse this to at least some extent
because languages are so different from one another.
Just the diversity alone is fascinating.
And as we'll see in this episode, there are other reasons for wanting to keep a language around.
There have been revival efforts, and the first one that most people think of is Hebrew.
And that was successful.