American Indian languages are disappearing because it has become less and less useful. You can’t get a job, describe the world you live in or improve your position in society unless you speak English. Thus, the Indian language gets used less and less and must be preserved by artificial means like a specimen in a museum or a zoo. We are losing our languages for the same reason we are losing our tigers and zebras and all the other flora and fauna that are of no immediate use to us. It’s a process that can’t be stopped nor protected because language evolves to interact with an environment. When that environment is gone, so will the language be.

How did those languages came to be? They were obviously created by their speakers. So there must be long term processes that precipitate their formation. While everyone is asking: how many languages are being destroyed last decade, I am much more interested in the question, how many have been created?

Humans are hardly the blind beings who take up any language that is imposed on them and forget about everything else, never to do anything new in the future.

When Rome conquered Europe and the Mediterranean, it wiped out a lot of languages and established Latin as the new language. Yet, Latin has vanished, with the exception of some rather anachronistic remnants. But it gave rise to Portugese, Catalan, Galego, Castillian, French, Basque, Italian, Raeto-Roman, Romanian (and whatever languages I forgot) and influenced a plethora of other languages, including the one I’m writing in.

So, where are the linguists monitoring the creation of languages? Warning against normative regulations that may mean that more useful, richer or easier to learn languages may never come into being? Isn’t ensuring improvement and creation of languages something that long term thinking should be more concerned about than the unavoidable extinction of old ones?

The scale and time scale of the project gives associations to The Long Now foundation.

Dzongsar Khyents Rinpoche says:

“My main reason for convening this conference is that I believe it’s entirely possible that the survival of the Buddhadharma could depend on it being translated into other languages. I also believe that by translating and making available the Tibetan Buddhist texts to modern people, a vast swathe of Buddhist civilization and culture may be saved from global annihilation. It’s clear we need to act quickly, and I believe the only way we can accomplish this monumental endeavor is by working together—pooling our skills, resources, experience and energy and coming up with a plan for translating the Buddhadharma. We must decide where we want this process to be in 10 years, 25 years, 50 years and 100 years”