There are seven thousand languages in the world, and just about half of these are endangered. Languages are rapidly becoming extinct because of globalization, as our modern world continues to develop in the way of business. People are communicating in widely known languages like English and Chinese to be apart of the professional world. Yet, the internet is helping to preserve these endangered languages before they go extinct. Endangered languages should be preserved because they represent distinct knowledge of cultures in the area of the world that it’s spoken, and these languages that are rapidly going extinct are some of the last resources of insight to unknown human history.
Yukaghir is an isolated language spoken alongside the Kolyma River in north eastern Siberia. During the seventeenth century, the language stretched from the West River Lena to the upper East River Anadyr, and from the North Arctic Ocean to the South Verkhoyansk Mountains. The said origin of the name Yukaghir is “icy or frozen people,” but it is still uncertain. The Yukaghir people are indigenous people of Eastern Siberia, and the language is split into Northern and Southern speakers. What’s left of the Northern speakers, also known as Tundra or Tundre, are just about one hundred and fifty people. The Southern speakers, also known as Forest, Kolyma or Odul speakers, are even more endangered, with just about fifty speakers left. Yet according to Dejan Matic in a 2009 survey, there are just five fluent speakers and just a few semi-fluent speakers of the Southern Yukaghir language, and seventy speakers of Northern Yukaghir language. With not many speakers left, a very small population of the Forest and Odul Yukaghir people still remain and live in the Nizhnekamsk district in Yakutia. A small population of Tundra Yukaghir speakers remain in the Srednekansk district in the Magadan region. Old data from the nineteen seventies say the population of Yukaghir speakers were just eight hundred thirty five, and within a decade, decreased to six hundred people. Thirty six percent of these were native speakers of the language, and even with their rapidly declining population of speakers, their language was first written down in the late nineteen seventies, using a unique spelling system called the Cyrillic alphabet. The origin of most of the Yukaghir vocabulary is still unknown. The grammatical structure and vocabulary is so different from Uralic languages, like Finnish and Hungarian, that the Yukaghir most likely separated from the common Uralic language before the Samoyedic, another language based in Siberia, or the Finno-Ugric people, dating back to more than eight thousand years ago.
Before Russian colonization of the seventeenth century, the Yukaghir tribes were widely spread out between the River Lena and the River Anadyr. Population was drastically reduced between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries because of disease, destructive warfare, and the colonization policy of the Tsarist government. By the nineteen thirties, the arrival of the Soviets in the Kolyma region in Yukaghir settlements became infiltrated by Russian officials and general people. Besides the two periods of Russian influence, the Yukaghir in the upper Kolyma region were able to somewhat preserve their language. By the nineteenth century, only two specific dialects survived, and they were the Forest Yukaghir and the Tundra Yukaghir.
An article titled Digital Tools ‘To Save Languages,’ written by Jonathan Amos, a science and space voice for BBC news, talks about how technology and the internet have had a positive affect in helping endangered languages from going extinct. In his article, K. David Harrison, a professor of linguistics, discusses the beneficial effects of globalization. Harrison goes on to say, “you can have a language that is spoken by only five or fifty people in one remote location, and now through digital technology… can achieve a global voice and a global audience” (Harrison 309). The Yukaghir language, with its people only having very few speakers left, could use the internet as a platform to record their language and culture to keep it from going extinct. There are already records of their spelling system and some vocabulary on the internet, with more websites being created specifically to protect these endangered languages and record them.
Preserving endangered languages is critical because with them, we can better understand their culture and history. Dr. Harrison continues to argue the importance for the preservation of these critically endangered languages, and how they need to be saved now. He explains that not every language can be saved, but with modern, growing technology we are already taking languages off the endangered list. Dr. Harrison tells BBC News, “Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably… all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages.” Harrison further explains his point by concluding, “If we care about sustainability and survival on the planet, we all benefit from having this knowledge base preserved” (Harrison 310).
In conclusion, we should be preserving and recording endangered languages because of crucial information of cultures around the world that are going extinct. These quickly declining languages are some of the last data we have to discover unknown human history. Using modern technology, we can record information on these languages, like Yukaghir, and help to prevent extinction.