New database offers insight into consequences of language loss

Since ancient times, we have lost numerous languages. Many of them we may never be able to decipher.

Would the world not be much better off if all or most humans spoke at least one common language and used one common alphabet? E.g. imagine Chinese was spoken/written as a second language and not as a first language by over one billion people, but calligraphy, cultural heritage and history e.g. make that very difficult if not impossible.

"... More than half of the world’s approximately 7,000 signed and spoken languages are currently endangered. And without intervention they are likely to become extinct, meaning nobody will speak or sign them any longer. ...
The novel database currently covers 2,467 language varieties spanning 215 different language families and 101 isolated languages from all inhabited continents and geographic areas. It captures 195 language properties — including word order, verbal tense, and whether a language features gendered pronouns — allowing researchers to draw comparisons between and across the languages. ..."

From the abstract:

"While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here, we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on the structural diversity of the world’s languages, evaluate constraints on linguistic diversity, and identify the world’s most unusual languages. An analysis of the consequences of language loss reveals that the reduction in diversity will be strikingly uneven across the major linguistic regions of the world. Without sustained efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages, our linguistic window into human history, cognition, and culture will be seriously fragmented."

New database offers insight into consequences of language loss | YaleNews Grambank, a database of 2,467 languages that Yale linguist Claire Bowern helped create, helps researchers better understand the stakes when languages die off.

Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss (open access)

Fig. 2. Grammatical similarity in the Grambank sample of languages.

The color coding represents the distribution of languages according to the first three principal components (PCs) mapped onto RGB color space