How Languages Actually DieAvailable now

About this book

When the last fluent speaker of Eyak died in 2008, more than a language disappeared. This book examines what becomes harder to think, perceive, and coordinate when the linguistic tools that once made certain distinctions cheap and automatic are no longer transmitted. Drawing on documented cases from Alaska to Australia, Amazonia, and Siberia, it shows how fine perceptual vocabularies, grammars that mark the source of every claim, absolute spatial systems, and relational kinship terminologies are quietly replaced by narrower defaults. The final chapter asks what happens when large language models are trained overwhelmingly on the languages that survived globalization—accelerating the same narrowing at machine speed.