By Greg Rosner

Boa Sr, who was around 85 years of age, died last week in the Andaman islands, about 750 miles off India’s eastern coast. While she lived to a ripe old age, the language which she grew up with, which is said to have evolved over 65,000 years, has died, and will likely never be spoken again. She was the last speaker of the Bo language.

I saw this on CNN today which got me thinking about how languages are born, grow and die. I will be blogging about this in the near future because this is related to the Genographic Project work that I have been involved with.

Today, there are approximately 7,000 languages spoken on earth. About half of them may not exist in 25 years. This is the natural consequence of cultures being absorbed by larger (more savage or technologically advanced – take your pick) neighbors over thousands of years of human migration. Some language extinctions, considering the last fifty thousand years of our shared human history, have happened by adoption, by force, by conquest, and by whole populations dying in regional isolation. (Sad – but true.)

There were believed to be 5,000 people speaking Bo when the British colonized land in 1858. Most of those tribal communities were subsequently killed or died of diseases.

While this continued extinction of about 3,500 spoken languages by 2035 seems inevitable, it is critical (and possible) that the details of these languages be recorded and saved, else they too will be lost forever from the record. At the University of London, in the School of Oriental and African Studies, they are soon to be hosting “Endangered Languages Week 2010” the purpose of which is to present a variety of displays, discussions, films, and workshops to provide a view of what is happening to languages and what is being done to document, archive and support endangered languages around the world. The Endangered Languages Project seeks to “provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community.