March 12, 2026
RIP or respawn?
Language Birth
Language Birth: funeral for old tongues or a baby boom on the internet
TLDR: The article mourns dying languages like Ubykh while arguing new speech styles, subcultures, and invented languages are booming. Comments explode: optimists celebrate fresh voices and K’iche’ success stories; skeptics say English’s rise means real diversity is fading—raising urgent questions about culture, identity, and what “new” really preserves.
A heart-tugging story about Ubykh’s last speaker, Tevfik Esenç, has the internet debating whether languages are dying or just shape-shifting. The article mourns the hundreds of tongues lost since 1960, then flips the script: niches, online subcultures, and even made-up “conlangs” are minting new ways to talk. Cue the comments section fireworks.
One camp grabbed the hopeful headline—“lost hundreds, gained thousands”—and ran with it. A learner chimed in with a feel‑good moment: sdsd’s move into K’iche’ (a Mayan language) felt like finally hearing an actual American language in the Americas, not just Portuguese, French, English, and Spanish. It’s the vibe of “language revival tour,” complete with proud shout‑outs to community classrooms and local radio.
But the doomers went full caps. GalaxyNova called the optimism “massive cope,” arguing that teen slang and TikTok can’t hide the great flattening—English is steamrolling small tongues, even in Romania. Their thesis: mass media, schools, and the internet are pushing everyone toward the same handful of languages, conlangs be damned.
There were quips, too: “Klingon can’t replace grandma’s lullaby,” and memes about trying to make “fetch” happen (yes, really). Meanwhile, linguistic nerds dropped Ubykh audio links and defended conlangs as creative, human, and fun—see also: constructed languages. Verdict? The thread split between a funeral and a gender reveal for language itself—tears in one eye, confetti in the other.
Key Points
- •Ubykh, a highly consonant-rich Caucasian language, lost its last fluent speaker, Tevfik Esenç, in 1992; he worked with linguists to document it.
- •Linguist John Colarusso highlighted Ubykh’s significance for understanding human phonetic perception.
- •Since 1960, hundreds of languages have gone extinct, with about 3,000 of ~7,000 languages worldwide currently endangered.
- •Global languages (e.g., English, Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi) continue to gain speakers as smaller languages decline.
- •Technology both weakens geographic barriers protecting languages and fosters new linguistic diversity through niche domains, online subcultures, and constructed languages.