There are more than 6900 languages currently spoken in the world today. Many languages are already in danger of disappearing because of various forces acting on the people that speak them. Many more may disappear in the future if the defects of current speech technology aren’t mitigated.
Just like biological entities, languages evolve or become extinct. There are many examples in history in which a language has evolved and given birth to a new one or to a new group of languages. There are also many examples of languages going extinct. There are various reasons why a language may become extinct. Military occupation of an area, immigration, emigration and political pressure are just some of the reasons for extinction. Some pressures are not so apparent because they are masked behind good intentions or because of the length of time in which they are applied. One example is the slow erosion on the many languages of Italy. Since the adoption of the Tuscan language as the official one to become Italian all the others began to be considered “dialects” even though they all evolved from the common language that was Latin. Up to WWI most of the languages were still mostly intact. The war forced people from different language communities to interact and so the only way people could communicate was through the lingua franca that was Italian. The final blow came when compulsory basic education with the teaching of the Italian language was established in the 1930’s. Since then those who speak a “dialect” are considered uneducated and are shamed. This has led to a continued increase of the use of Italian in place of the local languages. Often, the need to communicate between two or more different language communities leads them do adopt a common language that in the end leads to the demise of at least one of the preexisting languages.
Today, there may be a new pressure acting on language diversity, and it is a worldwide pressure. Speech processing has begun to be available and used more frequently on our technological companion devices. In the years to come this type of communication will be ever more present in our daily lives. The problem is that there are very few languages supported by this new technology and the speed with which new ones are supported is not sufficient to cover all the languages in the amount of time that it will take for global adoption of the technology. Some may say that this would lead to all of us becoming bilingual. That will surely happen in the mid term, but due to the principle of least effort and because we will all share a few common languages we will all start speaking the same language both with the devices and with our fellow humans.
People with speech disorders have not been at all considered in the expansion of the technology. To be able to include the speech impaired, using current technology, one would have to include a speech model for each type of speech impairment for each language. So the difficulty in adding languages would be at least an order of magnitude greater if one should include the speech impaired. While today there is at least partial language support for normal speaking people, there is no available support for the speech impaired.
Article 5 of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity states: “Cultural rights are an integral part of human rights, which are universal, indivisible and interdependent. … All persons have therefore the right to express themselves and to create and disseminate their work in the language of their choice, and particularly in their mother tongue.” On page 28 it says: “… there is no question that linguistic diversity is a necessary dimension of cultural diversity” In point number 5 its Implementation Plan would like to achieve the objective of: “Safeguarding the linguistic heritage of humanity and giving support to expression, creation and dissemination in the greatest possible number of languages” On page 22 it says: “cultural diversity is a source of enrichment for society, drawing upon a broad spectrum of world visions, enlightenment, ideologies and creativity that offer all citizens several possible lifestyles, both individual and collective. In other words, diversity offers new capabilities, skills and opportunities” The UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity raises cultural diversity to the level of “the common heritage of humanity”, “as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature”.