When my wife talks to her mother on the phone, she will inevitably pass it over to me. I will take a moment, recall the simple phrase in my head, then say into the microphone: “Yir enca ullar?”¹ I will hear a soft chuckle through the speaker, and then my mother-in-law, in English, will respond: “Ah! Very good!” She isn’t telling me that she is doing ‘very good.’ She is telling me that my pronunciation of ‘How are you?’ has improved since the last time we spoke.

My limited vocabulary in Tulu, my wife’s native language, has less to do with my inability to learn a new skill, and more to do with its inaccessibility for novice speakers like me. Google Translate², a database that can interpret over 240 world languages, cannot interpret Tulu. Duolingo, a site that offers lessons in Klingon, a fictional language from 40 years ago, does not offer lessons in Tulu, an actual language, which predates the birth of Christ by 500 years. And of the dwindling 1.8 million people worldwide who still speak Tulu, 90% live in a small region of southwest India.

Outside of her immediate family, there is virtually no one in the United States my wife can talk to in her native tongue. Not even me.

Tulu is just one of over 3,000 endangered languages across the globe that could soon be forgotten. Linguists estimate that one indigenous language goes extinct every 40 days, and because of factors like immigration, national laws, and the influx of technology, that rate of extinction will only increase by the end of this century.

I offer no solutions nor any groundbreaking research that can somehow reverse this linguistic transformation. Yet, I believe it is worthwhile to examine how these indigenous languages are disappearing so rapidly:

Immigration and Assimilation

Language attrition correlates the loss of a language to the lack of necessity one has to speak it. One of the clearest examples of language attrition happened to Japanese immigrants in the twentieth century. The first generation, known as Issei (Japanese-born people who immigrated to the U.S.), spoke Japanese even after they arrived on American soil. Their children, called Nisei (American-born), grew up speaking Japanese with their parents, but spoke English everywhere outside of the home. The third generation, called Sansei, spoke exclusively in English—even to their Nisei parents—since the obligation to speak Japanese was no longer present.

In a similar manner, my wife spent the first years of her childhood in India, surrounded by Tulu speakers. Now, three decades after she arrived in the U.S., her native tongue reemerges only on those weekend phone calls with her mother. Even then, English words often punctuate her speech when she cannot find the equivalent word in Tulu.

Executive Orders

Last month, the United States established English as the official language of the executive branch. While speaking the same language is undeniably useful to streamline communication, establishing one as ‘official’ underscores all others as unofficial, and therefore, at least implicitly, less important. In other countries where official languages have been established, it has become more difficult for nonnative speakers to pursue better-paying jobs or navigate the court system.

Even when executive orders are more inclusive of indigenous tongues, some are inevitably left off the list. India—arguably the most linguistically-diverse country in the world—has given legal status to 22 native languages. Still, the government does not explicitly recognize Tulu as one of them. Therefore, in the very country where Tulu originated some 2,500 years ago, it is nearly impossible to have legal documents, property deeds, or medical records printed using that lexicon.

The Digital Paradox

Recently, I was gifted some chocolate from France, and naturally, the label was printed exclusively in French. As I cannot speak more than a simple greeting in that language, I used the camera on my phone to translate, in augmented reality, the list of ingredients. As luck would have it, the chocolate in my hand contained hazelnuts, of which the author is highly allergic. I did not need to ‘learn’ French, nor did I need to painstakingly type each word into a translation engine. Just one click and I was seeing beyond the barrier of a foreign language in real time.

Technologies like camera phones can help people learn new languages, but those same devices that make learning so convenient are also curbing the necessity to do so. If I can use the device in my hand to translate—in real time—a language like French, what motivation do I have to learn that language at all? And for those indigenous tongues, whose lexicon has not yet been uploaded to the ether, AI might one day help translate these words for the rest of the world. But by that time, languages like Tulu may have already disappeared from the lips of native speakers.

¹ Written Tulu is similar to Sanskrit but is translated phonetically into English. Another common phonetic spelling is “Eer encha ullar”

² During the writing of this article, Google has since added Tulu to its database, though some of the diction is inaccurate, outdated, or borrowed from other indigenous languages and dialects. Additionally, Google does not offer a playback feature for Tulu, as it does for more common world languages like Spanish or Hindi.