Introduction:

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, today I present you a problem that most of you arent aware of, a problem that people dont worry about and that most dont notice the extinction of cultures. Cultures like the Olmecs, the Toltecs, the Gurg culture, that are going to disappear. Cultures like the Mayans or the Aztecs that still exist, but will soon become extinct. When we talk about culture, were talking about language, many different languages, and in my opinion, of all of the gifts of life, language is one of the most incredible. I can, in silence, understand what I think you wish me to know when you write to me. And I can perceive what I think your thoughts are and ask for clarification when you speak to me. You speak and you write, and you allow me to share a tiny part of you.

Through language, we can create, examine, and test concepts, those intangible figments of human thought and imagination, those playful flights of fantasy. Concepts can only be qualified, not quantified, only interpreted, not measured. And concepts can be re-qualified and re-interpreted hundreds, even thousands of years after they were first conceived when preserved in writinga track, like a footprint, we leave on some durable surface. Language thus guides thought, perception, sharing, and our sense of reality by archiving knowledge.

One of the greatest values of knowledge is that it allows us to search for truth be it in gardening or in a courtroom, while language allows us to share our knowledge as we strive to attain those ideals that we, as a society, perceive to be right and just. In this sense, language has become an imperative for the survival of human society, not only because the tenets of society are founded on language but also because our understanding of the interconnectedness of everything in Nature, as well as our place in the scheme of things, is founded on the same language. We simply must understand one another if our respective societies are to survive.

Every human languagethe master tool representing its own culturehas its unique construct, which determines both its limitations and its possibilities in expressing myth, emotion, ideas, and logic. As such, language is the medium with which the condition of the human soul is painted.

The artist, using words to convey the colors of meaning by mixing them on a palette of syntax, composes the broad shapes of a cultural storyline. Then, by matching the colors of

words to give expression to ideas, the artist adds verbal structure, texture, shades of meaning, and hue to the story. In doing so, the verbal artist paints a picture or portrait as fine as any accomplished with brush, paint, palette, and canvas; with camera film; or musical instruments and mute notes on paper. In addition, a verbal picture often outlasts the ravages of time that claim those of paint on canvas, imprints of light on photographic paper, or musical instruments that give voice to mute shapes.

As long as we have the maximum diversity of languages as media with which cultural artists can paint verbal pictures, we can see ourselvesthe collective human creature, the social animalmost clearly and from many points of view in a multitude of social mirrors. And who knows when an idiom of an obscure language, a primitive cultura l solution, or the serendipitous flash of recognition spurred by some ancient myth or modern metaphor may be the precise view necessary to resolve some crisis in our modern global society.

A case in point is the mystery of the way Mayan farmers fed their huge population in the tropical forest of the Yucatn peninsula. Rather than cutting down the forest and practicing the destructive slash-and-burn agriculture of today, they forged a reciprocal relationship with the tropical rainforests based on ecological acumen and cultural harmony long before the Spanish conquistadors set foot in the New World.

The Mayans practiced sustainable agriculture for centuries by constructing pet kotoob (plural of pet kot, Mayan for round wall of stone). A pet kot is a ro ck wall two to three feet high that encloses a small area about the size of a backyard garden. Within each pet kot, the Mayans grew agricultural plants not indigenous to their region.

The concept of a pet kot offers todays farmers in the Yucatn peninsul a a form of sustainable, tropical agriculture and forest caretaking, should they choose to use it, but only because the tool, the ideapet kotis still alive. What if the words pet kot had been lost to antiquity, and with them the idea had become extinct?

For us and our children and our childrens children to continue protecting the historical context of our cultural evolution, we need to protect one aspect of our culture that we normally neglect: language. Perhaps one of the greatest feats of humanity is the evolution of language, especially written language, which not only made culture possible but also archives and shares its history through stories.

Language is not something we generally think of as becoming extinct. Yet languages are disappearing all over the world, especially the spoken-only languages of indigenous peoples. While there were an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world in 2007, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

When we lose a language, we lose centuries of human thinking about time, seasons, sea creatures, reindeer, edible flowers, mathematics, landscapes, myths, music, the unknown and the everyday, says K. David Harrison, associate director of the Living Tongues Institute based in Salem,Oregon.

While it probably took thousands of years for the different human languages to evolve, it can take less than a century for some of them to disappear. What is lost when a language disappearsbecomes extinct, as it were? How many potential answers, how much ancient wisdom, will be lost because we are losing languages, especially obscure, primitive, or indigenous ones, to progress? What would it feel like to be the last human to speakand thus understandyour native language? What would it feel like to be the sole witness to the death of your culture, as it is relegated to the scrapheap of human refuse in the name of social progress?

With the loss of each language, we also lose the evolution of its logic and its cultural myths and rituals. Therefore, each time we allow a human language to become extinct, we are losing a facet of understanding, a facet of ourselvesthe collective memory of a people archived in their language, a memory that is part of the human hologram. Our growing blindness through the extinction of languages is exacerbated by the global spread of such languages as English, which limits the imagination and understanding within the rigid confines of its own fence of intellectual logic.

Sadly, 92-year-old Bobby Hogg died during the last week of September 2012, taking with him a little fragment of the English linguistic mosaic. Bobbys death is particularly noteworthy because he was the last person fluent in the Cromarty dialect once common to the seaside town of Cromarty, a remote fishing town on the tip of Scotlands Black Isle, 175 miles (280 kilometers) north of Edinburgh.

As the worlds melting pots grow ever bigger half the Earths population now lives in cities lesser-known dialects are evaporating. Worldwide, languages are disappearing regularly, with half of the globes 6,000-plus languages expected to be extinct by the end of the century, according to UNESCO.