65,000 Year Old Language Silenced

The last member of the Bo tribe, Boa Sr, died last week making another ancient people extinct. When a people go, their language and culture go with them. With rapid globalization many would ask, "So what?" Estimates of future language loss range from half of more than 6000 currently spoken languages being lost in the next 200 years, to 90% by the year 2050. No matter how you count it, that's a lot of ideas and culture gone forever.

As author and anthropologist Wade Davis puts it, language extinction effectively reduces the "entire range of the human imagination... to a more narrow modality of thought" and thus privileges the ways of knowing in dominant (and overwhelmingly Western) languages such as English. Foucauldian ideas of power and knowledge, as both inseparable and symbiotic, are implicated in the universalizing of Western knowledge as truth, and the rendering of other forms as less valid or false: mere superstition, folklore, or mythology. In the case of language extinction, those "voices which are deemed to be inferior or secondary by colonizing, globalizing, or developing forces are literally silenced."

Davis also says, "Genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnicide, the destruction of a people’s way of life is not only not condemned, it’s universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy."

Every time we lose a language we, as a world, are further impoverished. Below is a video of Boa Sr singing and speaking in the Bo language. Listen and weep for her and for us.