A Word of Difference

In the past 500 years, thousands of languages have disappeared, becoming extinct, similar to that of plant diversity. A Word of Difference examines the relationship between the decline of the world’s endemic languages and that of the planet’s biodiversity.

Harmon writes

“It is perfectly conceivable that life on Earth could have evolved so as to present us with conditions much closer to those that, say, a prisoner feels in solitary confinement. Rather than a world supplied with millions of species, thousands of languages and other cultural distinctions, and a tremendously varied landscape, we might have drawn one far more barren. We could have been born into a world populated by starlings and weeds, where every person spoke and dressed and ate and behaved more or less the same, where every field and town looked pretty much like any other… But we were lucky. We got the world that we have. The one we have inherited is truly, even yet, a world of difference. At its heart is a paradox: human beings need sameness, but being human means we first need genuinely rich stores of biocultural diversity to distill it from. If we continue to act in ways that destroy diversity, life of a sort will go on, but our aliveness – our uniquely human feeling of what life is supposed to be about – will have become extinct.”