Easy for you to say, for now

Language is a living thing. It grows and changes. It interacts with its surroundings. It ingests material for sustenance and, uh, leaves behind material it can’t use. It is also predatory. The biggest and baddest languages are stalking, pouncing upon and devouring the lesser ones.
I heard about a linguist adventurer who goes around the world studying languages in their death throes. He’s sort of Noam Chomsky crossed with Frank Buck (there’s two references to send many a reader to Wikipedia). He goes to exotic places finding the last speakers of these disappearing tongues.
In an interview I listened to via an iTunes podcast this Indiana Jones language guy, Dr. David Harrison, states there are approximately seven thousand languages in the world today and something like half of them are endangered. These languages are another causality of the globalization of society as a whole. Because technology has made it possible to talk to people all over the world in an instantaneous manner we have to have words the guy in Dongguan, China can understand to send through the fiber-optic doohickey connecting us. To that end, the big languages are killing off the local ones. Like a verbose Wal-Mart destroying locally owned grocery stores.
Dr. Harrison believes a language becomes extinct every two weeks when the last speaker dies, se muere, muore, dobbelstenen, or iesda. The reason these languages die with the last fluent speaker is the majority of languages do not have written versions.
The reasons scientists care about learning about lingo on life support is we can learn how languages work and how people interact with each other. These dying languages also show us how language must have been in the beginning for even our bully language beating up these 98 pound weakling languages.
Learning about these indigenous tongues can also give useful insight into the region and what is important to the people in it. You’ve probably heard the old story that some Eskimo languages have dozens upon dozens of words for snow. Each word is created to describe a different kind of snow because to a person who lives constantly surrounded by the stuff the nuances differentiating the various kinds of snow are much more noticeable and important. For instance we just say, “My car is stuck in the snow” because we don’t see the need for describing it in any more detail. On the other hand a person living in the arctic needs to be more specific, i.e. “My sled is stuck in a fine powdery snow which means I can dig it out with a plastic spoon I got with my bucket of extra crispy antlers from Saskatoon Fried Reindeer in about three minutes” or “My sled is stuck in a snow so compacted each flake is fused together at a molecular level which would require a laser beam and a team of ninjas to separate a single flake from its no-two-are-just-alike brethren.”
Something I found interesting about these very regional languages is they tend to be more poetic than our behemoth tongue (behemoth tongue…that sounds like a good nickname for Rush Limbaugh). For instance Dr. Harrison spoke a phrase from one of these arcane languages (which of course I can’t put on paper because there are no letters to represent it) and said it was what they used in order to transmit the same image we create in our head when we hear the word “sun”. If you took the phrase apart it was saying “eye of the sky.” Now that is just cooler and more musical than just saying sun. We could say the eye of the sky is hot today, but unfortunately the “eye in the sky” phrase brings to our modernistic technological minds the spy satellites which are at this moment peering into your living room and watching you scratch a rather private area while singing your favorite ABBA song and consuming mass quantities of a cheese food substance directly from its aerosol can dispenser. Maybe that’s just me?
I look at the early stages of language represented by these disappearing ones and I see the growth cycle English probably went through. It started as an infant spoken-only language. It then grew into a teenager as a written language. The language matured to real adulthood when grammar and spelling rules gave it consistent form. Now it is deteriorating into senility as texters destroy spelling and grammar and many speakers have the same breadth of vocabulary as a twelve year old found in a forest who was raised by wolves and an FM radio.