Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter­gatherers, small, tightly knit connected groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.

Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialization, the development of the nation­state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalisation and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3，200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number (中位数) of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

Already well over 400 of the total of 6，800 languages are close to extinction, with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busuu in Cameroon (eight remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark): none of these seems to have much chance of survival.

What is language for ? Some people seem to think it’s for practising grammar rules and learning lists of words — the longer the lists , the better. That’s wrong. Language is for the exchange of ideas and information. It’s meaningless knowing all about a language if you can’t use it freely. Many students I have met know hundreds of grammar rules , but they can’t speak correctly or fluently. They are afraid of making mistakes. One shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes when speaking a foreign language. Native speakers make mistakes and break rules , too. Bernard Shaw once wrote ,“ Foreigners often speak English too correctly.” But the mistakes that native speakers make are different from those that Chinese students make. They’re English mistakes in the English language. And if enough native speakers break a rule , it is no longer a rule. What used to be wrong becomes right. People not only make history , they make language. But a people can only make its own language. It can’t make another people’s language. So Chinese students of English should pay attention to grammar , but they shouldn’t overdo (做过头) it. They should put communication first.

The Wampanoag language was not dead. To call it dead would be an insult to the ancestors who left it for future generations as a way to communicate-and a way to teach. But it was “unspoken” until linguist Jessie “Little Doe” Baird brought it back. Her project’s Wampanoag dictionary holds more than 11,000 entries.

Words on paper are not a language. A language lives through the people who speak it. So Baird founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. She teaches community classes and family camps. Kids in grade school and high school have the opportunity to learn the language.

The Wampanoags have lived for 12,000 years in Massachusetts and parts of Rhode Island. When the Pilgrims (清教徒) met the first Indigenous people, those were the Wampanoags. The English settlers brought disease that killed thousands-an estimated two-thirds of the Wampanoag Nation died-as well as war and rules that fragmented (分裂) the tribes. There once were 69 tribes in the nation; now there are three. Baird is a citizen of the Mashpee tribe. Her ancestors left a key to their language. They translated the King James Bible into Wampanoag. They left hundreds of documents in their written alphabet (字母表).

Baird describes a vision she had where her ancestors helped her see it was time to bring the language home. She began her research, which led her to a graduate degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she learned from and worked with other linguists. In 2010, she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, earning a “genius grant” to further her work.

“It’s incredibly difficult to reclaim a language, even more so when there are no speakers alive, and even more so when you’re driving 90 minutes a day, each way, to attend graduate school, with four small children at home.”

“I might have been afraid to do the work had I known that,” Baird says with a laugh now. “But I didn’t, and so here we are.”