On BYU campus, where 55 languages are regularly taught and more than 110 are spoken, there is a strong appreciation for language diversity and its cultural importance. But of the more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, half are considered endangered and likely to go extinct within this century.
In October K. David Harrison, a field linguist and associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, came to Brigham Young University and spoke about why languages become extinct, why language 
preservation matters, and what steps are being taken to preserve languages.
“If you talk to a biologist, you will find that something like 80 percent of the plant and animal species that are thought to exist in the world have not yet been named or described within a Western scientific framework,” Harrison said. “They are essentially unknown to science.” Similarly, Harrison explained, we only have adequate descriptions for maybe 10 to 12 percent of the world’s languages.
This shortage of knowledge is not for a lack of trying. Just take BYU’s community of linguists, who study over a dozen lesser-spoken languages around the globe, from the Marshallese language of Micronesia to the Aymará language of the Andes Mountains. Closer to home, Dirk Elzinga travels across the Great Basin studying Native American languages like Shoshoni, Hopi, Southern Paiute, and Chemehuevi, while Deryle Lonsdale researches the Salish languages of his ancestors in the Pacific Northwest.
Harrison has done similar work, focusing on languages with just a handful of speakers left. As a linguist, author, and activist for the documentation and preservation of endangered languages, Harrison has contributed to more than 100 online talking dictionaries. He’s done extensive work with the National Geographic Society, especially on their Enduring Voices project, and costarred in the Emmy-nominated 2008 documentary The Linguists, produced by Ironbound Films. His work has taken him around the world to locations he refers to as “language hotspots.”
In his presentation, Harrison described language hotspots as possessing specific traits: (1) high language diversity, (2) high levels of language endangerment, and (3) low documentation of languages.
Of the 24 hotspots that he has identified worldwide, Harrison noted one whose language community is particularly small. Ös is a Siberian language spoken by approximately seven people. In his field research, Harrison worked with Anna and Aleskei Baydashev, the last living couple that speaks Ös on a daily basis. In an interview, the two revealed that even they had lost much of their language; when asked to name the months of the Ös lunar calendar, the couple could only name five of the 13. Despite working with locals to create a storybook in Ös, Harrison saw little hope for the language.
“Language extinction is a real thing happening to real people,” Harrison said. “Language revitalization can be a strategic voice made even at a very late stage in the life cycle of a language. And something like literacy, which never before existed for Ös, can emerge in the very terminal stage of the language’s existence.”
As Harrison concluded his remarks, he noted the importance of preserving the knowledge locked away in these dying languages. He quoted one of the speakers of these endangered languages—Anthony Degio, a young Indian Koro-Aka speaker—who equated language with culture: “Loss of culture is loss of identity, so we must continue our Koro language.”