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To short wave from NPR.
Across the world, the places with the greatest biodiversity are also the places with the greatest language diversity.
Researchers don't fully know why, but it's a phenomenon seen again and again in the Amazon and in the Pacific Islands.
For instance, Papua New guinea is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world, and it is also the most linguistically diverse places in the world.
This is Dr.
Lydia Liu, a professor at Columbia University and co editor of a book called Global Language justice, which calls attention to the fact that in a time of mass extinction and climate change, we are also living in a time of rapid language loss.
Why is that a loss?
Well, different people will give different answers.
And there's the human reason, of course.
People are attached to their languages emotionally.
They attach to their families and to their community.
So the human element here specifically involves people's breath, right?
Are they able to articulate utterly their own sounds?
And this language loss is happening disproportionately within indigenous communities in the tropics.
The United nations estimates that one indigenous language dies every two weeks.
We know that more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing by the end of the century.