The survival of ancient dialects matters not just for scholarship, but because of the wisdom they convey about how to live with nature

The launch of a “last chance” crowdsourcing tool to record a vanishing Greek dialect drew attention back this week to one of the great extinctions of the modern world: nine languages are believed to be disappearing every year. Romeyka, which is spoken by an ageing population of a few thousand people in the mountain villages near Turkey’s Black Sea coast, diverged from modern Greek thousands of years ago. It has no written form.

For linguists, it is a “living bridge” to the ancient Hellenic world, the loss of which would clearly be a blow. But some languages are in even bigger trouble, with 350 that have fewer than 50 native speakers and 46 that have just one. A collaboration between Australian and British institutions paints the situation in stark colours, with a language stripes chart, devised to illustrate the accelerating decline in each decade between 1700 and today. Its authors predict that between 50% and 90% of the world’s 7,000 languages will be extinct by 2150. Even now, half of the people on the planet speak just 24 of them.