spoken by indigenous people in California for  more than 10,000 years – died with him. And  

Yurok isn’t alone; every year, an estimated  nine languages go extinct. That’s why,  

if you look at an official count of the total  number of living languages in the world over time,  

you can see that … wait, huh?  How are we gaining languages?

Hi, I’m David, and this is MinuteEarth.

First off, even though some languages are  going extinct, others that have been around  

for a long time – like Lakurumau, spoken  by a small group of villagers in Papua New  

Guinea – are only just being described by  experts, and so they’re only now getting  

added to the official count. You know how  there are species that have been around  

for ages – like the shrew-like animal called  a gymnure, which has been shrewing around in  

the mountains of the Philippines for hundreds  of thousands of years – but they’re only just  

being photographed and documented for  the first time? It’s a lot like that.

But by far the biggest reason for the increase  in living languages is the realization that what  

we once thought was one language is actually  a group of similar but distinct languages.

Like, until the early 2000s, most experts  considered Arabic – spoken by more than a  

billion people – a single language. But  as linguists learned more about all the  

different versions of Arabic, they realized  that some versions were so different that  

people speaking them couldn’t even  understand each other. As a result,  

what used to be one language is now  officially more than 30 different languages.

Actually, that TOO is a lot like what’s going  on with species on Earth; like, for a long time,  

scientists considered giraffes to be  a single species. But recent genetic  

research has revealed that there are actually  four separately-evolving groups of giraffes,  

prompting a proposal to quadruple the  official number of giraffe species out there.

So the number of known languages currently  spoken on Earth and the number of described  

species currently living on Earth are both  officially increasing, but only because we're  

getting better – and pickier – about documenting  and categorizing what’s out there, not because  

we’re actually gaining diversity. I mean,  sure – new species and new languages ARE still  

occasionally evolving, but that’s a really slow  process; as our planet globalizes and homogenizes,  

existing species and languages are going  extinct way faster than new ones are evolving.

Soon, it’s likely that we’ll reach peak  language and peak species – that is,  

we'll have documented and nit-picked basically  all we can, yet we’ll be losing languages and  

species faster than ever – so the official counts  will begin to reflect the reality on the ground.

Which is…depressing. Occasionally, though, we  might be able to raise a language or species from  

the dead. We’re still working on figuring out how  to clone dinosaurs, but Yurok – that indigenous  

language that died in 2013 – is alive again; it’s  actively being taught in some high schools, and  

today, more than 300 kids speak it proficiently.  So despite all the linguistic and biological  

diversity we’re losing, perhaps – every once in  a while – life – and language – will find a way.

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