The language universe is shrinking – can we stop it?

Before 1788, the number of languages spoken in Australia was at least 300 – though experts estimate there may have been more than 700.

Today, only 12 are still being learnt as a first language by children.

The United Nations has warned that 3,000 languages could disappear before the end of the century at a rate of one every two weeks.

Language researchers like Professor Evan Kidd, an expert in psycholinguistics at The Australian National University (ANU), are on a race against time to study the world’s linguistic diversity before it fades into silence.

Small languages, big discoveries

Despite great efforts to document the thousands of languages spoken globally, researchers have historically prioritised ‘big’ languages such as English, German, and Mandarin.

Studies on how children learn their languages have only been conducted in a minuscule 1.5 per cent of the planet’s native tongues.

Such limited focus overlooks a treasure trove of more than 6,000 smaller languages, each containing invaluable knowledge about the intricate workings of the human mind.  

Though less frequent, studies on smaller languages have revealed groundbreaking insights, such as how the words we use can shape our perception of the world.

Working with Indigenous communities in Australia, Kidd’s team has been the first to investigate how speakers of free word order languages plan their sentences and the countless ways they encode the world around them.

Unlike the rigid subject-verb-object speech pattern of English, many of Australia’s Aboriginal languages, such as Murrinhpatha or Pitjantjatjara, are free-form. 

“Speakers are happy to use a wide variety of word orders, and often report no difference in meaning when the order is changed,” Kidd says.

“In comparison to languages like English or Dutch, speakers of Murrinhpatha and Pitjantjatjara show very fast planning strategies to choose word orders.”

These strategies capture the whole of an event before making language choices, rather than only identifying the subject of the sentence, as we would in English.

“Understanding how languages differ allows us to understand ourselves,” Kidd says.

 “Without collective efforts to strengthen threatened languages, which crucially involve communities and not just researchers, this critical knowledge will be lost to time.

“There are many dimensions of tragedy in language loss. It can be a source of trauma for cultural groups. But not only that; it can also prevent us from gaining a deeper understanding of the natural world.

“The information encoded in language can lead to novel scientific revelations, such as the identification of compounds for the development of new drugs or climate-resilient land management practices.”

Children hold the key

The future of the language universe rests with those who are least accountable for the world they’ve inherited: our children.

Children happen to be the kings and queens when it comes to mastering a language.

“We are born with many more brain cells than we need, and children, with plenty of free time, devote a lot of those unspent cells to the task of language learning,” Kidd says.

By studying the minds of young learners, psycholinguists like Kidd have gained insights on how to strengthen threatened languages.

“A critical step on the pathway to language loss is when children stop learning it. However, if we provide them with the right language acquisition conditions, we can short-circuit that process,” he says. 

“That’s why kids are central to our studies and key to stemming the flow of language loss.”

“The reasons why we live in an unprecedented era of language endangerment and loss are complex, but the most obvious ones point at globalisation and colonialism.”

Professor Evan Kidd

A multilingual future?

Australia prides itself on being one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. Yet, ironically, society operates almost exclusively in English.

As populations age and migration flows to OECD nations, a pressing question emerges: is the future destined to be dominated by only a handful of languages?

While this scenario isn’t entirely far-fetched, Kidd prefers to advocate for a more optimistic outlook.

“Creating a more multilingual society, in which people can access services in other languages, can achieve better outcomes for multicultural communities,” he says.

“There are also economic benefits. We live in the most linguistically diverse region of the world, and having multilingual capacity would enable us to interact and trade with our neighbours in a future where English may not always be the default lingua franca.”

But achieving the ideal multilingual society requires proper resourcing.

“The kinds of research projects and initiatives that document and help strengthen Australia’s first languages, for example, run on the smell of an oily rag. It’s important these efforts are adequately funded,” Kidd says. 

“Also, requiring multilingual children to learn exclusively through their second language, such as English in Australia, can be disastrous. This is most problematic in Indigenous communities, where English-medium teaching regularly fails students.”

For Kidd, initiatives such as bilingual education and leveraging new technologies are steps that Australia can take to preserve and celebrate linguistic diversity.

“The reasons why we live in an unprecedented era of language endangerment and loss are complex, but the most obvious ones point at globalisation and colonialism,” he says.

“Languages are lost because they are replaced by more dominant ones. By fostering a mindset of multilingualism, we can create a context where smaller and bigger languages coexist.

“A multilingual future is diverse, distributed, and coloured with the whole spectrum. A dominantly monolingual one is, by comparison, simplified, hierarchical, and monochromatic.”