The boomerang

In this world, more than 7,000 languages are spoken. Unfortunately, however, more than 3,000 are threatened with extinction. And I'm not talking about our Catalan language, which no matter how much it suffers attacks every day, is still far from suffering the circumstances that languages will face in a few months that no one will speak. Because we are letting languages die at a furious pace: every two weeks a language disappears in this world. This, in the 21st century, when it seems that AI performs miracles, and that the moralization of society had reached higher levels than in any other period of history. Because the vast majority of people on this planet speak languages that are demographically large, a few hundred languages spoken by 90% of the global population.

The reasons why languages die, however, are diverse: all speakers can die, as happened in Africa after some epidemics (AIDS) or in America after the arrival of smallpox with the Spanish conquest. But what links them are the pressures from speakers of dominant languages, who end up convincing speakers of minority and minoritized languages to abandon them, convinced of their irrelevance or the few opportunities for social advancement that continuing with their mother tongue gives them. This has happened especially in Australia, where, in addition to genocide, they have suffered this marginalization in one of the places with the most linguistic variety on the planet, with more than 250 aboriginal languages, of which right now only 14 have an uncertain good health. What imperial pressure did on indigenous linguistic richness is not unknown to us: school prohibitions, forced displacement, marginalization, etc. Words that have passed into English and then into Catalan, such as ‘kangaroo’, ‘koala’, ‘wombat’ and ‘boomerang’, come from Australian indigenous languages, such as Dharug, which was spoken in the area of what would be Sydney, and which, therefore, received the brunt, both from epidemics that only affected its speakers and from forced schooling in the colonizer's language of indigenous children. Their words went around the world and reached all languages, but they were condemned to disappear. A whole lesson.

When a language is lost, much more is lost than with the fall of an empire.