The human capacity for symbolic communication — the system of sounds, signs, or gestures through which meaning is created, shared, and transmitted — the foundation on which every other human cultural achievement rests, and one of the most contested subjects in cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy.
There are approximately 7,000 languages currently spoken on earth, and one is dying every two weeks. The rate of language death accelerates as communities shift to dominant languages — English, Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic — for economic and social survival. A language is not merely a communication system. It is a way of encoding a community's accumulated knowledge about its environment, its relationships, its history, and its understanding of the world. When a language dies, that knowledge dies with it — including, often, knowledge of medicinal plants, ecological relationships, and social practices that have no equivalent in any other language. Language death is a form of knowledge extinction that leaves no fossil record.