doesn't it just fucking rule how most of the native american languages are critically endangered if not already extinct? tuscaroran language of ontario has three living native speakers. kiowa in oklahoma has 20. chickasaw, also oklahoma, has 50

you can throw a dart at a list of native american languages and you'll most likely hit one with fewer than a thousand fluent speakers, and you most likely *won't* hit one with an active ongoing effort to document it before it vanishes from existence altogether

not that i have any great plan on what to do about this except obviously someone should fund general efforts to preserve endangered languages in online dictionaries. this just makes me rly upset to think about. so many languages have disappeared from existence with barely a trace

and this saddens me from an "i like studying languages" perspective, but also when i think about the culture that goes with it. many of these languages were surviving on oral tradition alone, which means when the last native speakers die, they basically take their culture with

them. i absolutely believe language and culture are homologous. you lose one, the other goes with it. you can often determine what a culture was like long after it's gone if you happen to have made a decent enough record of their language before they went extinct.

or, of course, if they made one themselves. many language cease existing and the only way to estimate what they possibly sounded like is by analysing the surrounding, surviving languages, because the extinct one has no writing system and therefore nothing recorded in it

i think this is really fucking tragic but i make an personal exception for cases like the north sentinelese, who are infamously dedicated to not being seen or heard. if a culture is so set on total insularity that they chase away any & all outsiders, they have their right to that

anyone who tries to find out anything about their culture (or preach their religion to the natives like a fucking asshole) has to sneak past the indian government and gets hoisted on a wooden pole and cannibalised for their efforts. it sucks that we'll definitely never be able to

preserve their language, but it makes sense. meanwhile there are THOUSANDS of critically extinct languages where preservation efforts are 100% viable but aren't happening. what makes their language not worth keeping in existence when it's entirely possible?

fwiw this is an amphetamine-fuelled rant and most likely isn't still about what i started writing it about. sorry about that