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A database of 2,467 languages helps researchers better understand the stakes when languages die off [yale.edu]:

Languages, like animal species, can go extinct. More than half of the world's approximately 7,000 signed and spoken languages are currently endangered. And without intervention they are likely to become extinct, meaning nobody will speak or sign them any longer.

While language loss is happening across the world, the costs vary strikingly in different places, according to a new study co-authored by Yale linguist Claire Bowern. Regions where all Indigenous language are endangered — including parts of South America and the United States — face the greatest consequences.

The study, recently published in the journal Science Advances, is the first to use Grambank — the world's largest and most comprehensive database of language structure — to better understand global linguistic diversity and the threat that language loss poses to humanity's collective knowledge of history, culture, and cognition.

[...] The novel database currently covers 2,467 language varieties spanning 215 different language families and 101 isolated languages from all inhabited continents and geographic areas. It captures 195 language properties — including word order, verbal tense, and whether a language features gendered pronouns — allowing researchers to draw comparisons between and across the languages.

"Grambank is like a DNA code of languages," she said. "We can use it to make comparisons to build language trees or examine how languages that split from a common ancestor differ from each other. We can identify features that are very rare in languages across the globe and figure out which of those features are particularly associated with endangered languages."

[...] "Once linguistic diversity is lost, it's not easily recovered," said Bowern, a historical linguist whose work focuses on language change and language documentation in Indigenous Australia. [...]

The analysis also revealed that there is a lot more variation across languages than was widely believed and provides important insights into how languages evolve and diversify. For example, the researchers show that genealogy — the gradual changing and splitting of languages over time — plays a larger role in shaping linguistic diversity than does geography, through which languages borrow words and grammatical constructs via contact between people speaking different languages.

Grambank's developers hope that other researchers will began to use the database to discover new patterns in linguistic diversity, Bowern said.

The current release version of the Grambank data can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7740139 [doi.org]

Journal Reference:
Hedvig Skirgård et al., Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss, Sci. Adv., Vol 9, Issue 16, 2023. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg6175 [doi.org]

Original Submission