I’ve been to Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, three times. One time was on a large passenger ship, and the other was to circumnavigate the continent by kayak. The area is notoriously difficult for navigation, with thousands of ships said to have been wrecked there. A map showing known shipwreck sites is displayed in a museum in Puerto Williams, the southernmost port city. It’s a terrifying stretch of water.

The Yaghan people lived here more than 20,000 years ago. They were a Mongoloid race that crossed the Bering Strait from Asia to North America and continued southward until they arrived 6,000 years ago. I met the last of these people, a woman who could speak the Yaghan language. However, she died in 2022, marking the end of the Yaghan people as a people.

The death of this woman signifies the disappearance of a language as well as the disappearance of a people. There are approximately 7,000 languages ​​in existence in the world today, but only about half are used stably by a certain number of people. The rest are at risk of extinction as languages ​​in everyday use. Furthermore, since 90% of the world’s population speaks approximately 100 languages, the risk of extinction is accelerating.

Recognizing that this situation makes it difficult for speakers of diverse languages ​​to communicate with each other and hinders international exchange, Polish scientist L.L. Zamenhof invented the universal language Esperanto in the late 19th century. However, it is currently only spoken by an estimated 2 million people worldwide, and it has not yet spread as widely as hoped.

However, in recent years, there have been active efforts to preserve languages ​​at risk of extinction. Australia’s indigenous Aboriginal people, scattered across a vast country, once spoke approximately 600 languages. Today, this number has dwindled to around 150, with approximately 100 of these languages ​​facing extinction. The government is therefore making efforts to preserve these languages, believing that English and Aboriginal languages ​​have equal value.

Similar efforts are underway in Japan as well. The Yaeyama language is spoken on Yaeyama Island in the Ryukyu Islands, while the Yonaguni language is spoken on Yonaguni Island. However, the former has only about 50,000 speakers, and the latter about 400, raising concerns about its future. Even more serious is the Ainu language, with only a single-digit number of fluent speakers. Both languages ​​are isolated, making preserving and passing on their meanings difficult.
This has led to the emergence of a method to preserve endangered languages ​​using artificial intelligence. Kyoto University is developing technology for Ainu, using deep learning AI to recognize meaning from audio information and pronounce it using voice synthesis. Google is developing software that uses AI to recognize images of objects and pronounce their names in endangered languages.
As we will see later, similar information has no value. Information is essentially different from one another, and the resulting diversity is its greatest value. While convenient, smartphone technology has recently emerged that allows instant language translation, a technology that hinders the preservation of diverse cultures. We must recognize that the use of language is essential to humanity.

※Translating Japanese articles into English with AI