According to researchers, once every two weeks, one of our roughly 7,000 distinct world languages disappears forever. With over 7 million native speakers, Spanish isn’t in any danger of disappearing. But many of the unique languages spoken by indigenous peoples throughout South America are in danger.
As indigenous people strive to assimilate (sometimes under significant pressure from the government to do so) they often gradually lose the ability to speak their mother tongue. This is especially true in regions where indigenous people must travel to major cities in order to find work. Practicing speaking a language that only a few hundred or a few thousand people understand starts to seem like a pretty low priority. Children often don’t learn the ancestral language at all, and eventually, when the elders pass away, the language dies out.
While linguists have been recording dying languages for decades in an vain effort to preserve them, the fact is that without a living native speaker no amount of documentation can really bring the language back to life. In recent years, linguists have adapted the strategy of involving native peoples in the efforts to preserve their own languages and cultures by encouraging them to write books.
This strategy was recently used to help preserve Mapudungun, the language of Chile and Argentina’s Mapuche people. Linguists visited schools in the predominantly Mapuche cities of Puerto Saavedra and Carahue and asked Mapuche schoolchildren to write stories in Mapudungun. The resulting ebook, called The Thoughts of Children, was published last month. You can learn more about the book by watching a documentary film that chronicles the project.