The disappearance of languages can be traced to various causes. Invasions of territory, economic collapse, population decline are some historical reasons for that. More subtle reasons may be found, like the growing prestige of another language in the area, or need for communication and thus using an available language as a lingua franca. English is an example of the last two. It has become the language of choice in many contexts and is being taught as a second language in almost all countries of the world. We still don’t speak English with each other if our mother tongue isn’t English because the world is only starting to be completely connected. Before the modern era language decline had only ever been on a local scale. This is because people had been able to communicate with each other only locally. The invention of the airplane and now internet have brought with them the capacity to communicate on a global level. Our social interactions have now extended out of our local area, we can communicate with people on any part of the globe with a tap on our smartphones. Thus language decline has been elevated to the global level.
In the past, language decline was a process that took centuries to manifest itself. The reasons for that were probably due to the number of people that spoke a language and the number of social interactions between them. The population of the world was much lower than in the modern era and so were the number of people that spoke any language of the past. The fact that most people lived in rural areas limited their social interactions and as people moved to the cities in the last centuries their social interactions grew. Proof that these reasons slow down language decline can be seen in the isolated areas of the world where some languages still exist with very little change. Today, we are more than 7 billion people in the world and our social interactions have not only grown in quantity but also in speed. We don’t even need to go out of our home to meet other people. Today, any threat to a language would not take centuries to be fulfilled.
One aspect of modern society has never been seen in societies of the past. Today, we have something continually at our side, the smartphone. Since its appearance we have come to depend on it as never have any other society of the past depended on any one object. We consider it our window to the rest of the world. Speech processing for the smartphone is a needed enhancement. Using the smartphone like a personal computer is cumbersome, so the main technology producing companies have decided that speech processing for the smartphone is the next great step for its global acceptance. This step will increase our social interactions because we will have one more “person” to talk to, our smartphone. And since it is always with us we will talk to it continuously. Imagine if we needed to talk to our smartphone in a language that is not our own. We would learn that language very quickly and most of the people we interact with in person would do the same. What need would there be to speak our original language if we all knew the smartphone language?
Our social interactions today are more and more connected with people that speak languages different from our own. Current technology would permit us to speak in our own language and the result be translated to the receiver in their language. This is already ongoing for certain languages but would need support for all languages for it to be universally accepted. In the meantime we will continue to interact with others by using intermediary languages like English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese or Arabic. This is not a bad situation per se but combined with the problem of reduced language support for speech processing in smartphones it would contribute to a reduced use of local languages.
Unfortunately there is no way to quantify how many or how quickly languages would disappear because of limited language support on speech processing personal electronic devices. We can reasonably argue that, given the huge increase in world population and the reduction from months to seconds for interpersonal communication that the number of social interactions per day*A convenience unit of measure for sake of argument. from the end of the medieval period*The end of the medieval period is a time in which the rate of social interaction started growing at a faster rate. to modern times has increased thousands or tens of thousands of times. Since the medieval period, the western world saw languages like Latin, Gothic and Celtic languages slowly disappear. For the sake of argument, we could say that 1 language disappeared every 1000 years. At that rate, and considering the aforementioned increase in social interactions we could predict 1 language per year disappearing today due to increasing social interactions and reduced language support for speech processing on electronic devices.
The main companies that are currently promoting speech processing technology on electronic devices are still a long way from making all languages available. The approximate numbers are as follows:
- Microsoft ∼ 25
- Apple ∼ 40
- Google ∼ 40
- Amazon 2
We can analyze the current effort in language model creation by citing one example of which there is some data. Google, in 2017, made 21 languages available. Considering circa 20 languages per year and a total of circa 6900 languages in the world we will need 345 years to support them all. The only way to cover all the world’s languages within 50 years is to produce at least 140 languages per year. This is a 7 fold increase of current production and still 50 languages would go extinct because of this problem.