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Terralingua (TL) is a non-profit, international organization founded in 1996 by a group of professionals working in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, biodiversity conservation, and human rights who shared a fundamental belief: that the challenge of protecting, maintaining, and restoring the diversity of life on earth is the challenge of supporting and promoting diversity in nature and culture.
The Biocultural Diversity of Life
We in Terralingua think of the diversity of life as biocultural diversity, made up of the variety of plant and animal species and ecosystems, cultural traditions, and languages that have developed on the planet. We see these diversities as intimately related to, and profoundly shaping, one another over the history of human presence and activities on earth. There is an increasing awareness that humans are an integral part of nature, and that we have helped shape many "natural" environments. This points to co-evolution between humans and the natural environments in which our species evolved. Therefore, understanding the role of humans within the natural world, and the languages and cultures that define that role, is becoming increasingly important to a holistic view of diversity. Moreover, languages, as the main carriers of cultural traditions, play a central role in the relationship between humans and nature, by encoding and transmitting knowledge, beliefs, and values about the environment through words, ways of speaking, stories, songs, and many other forms of expression. Terralingua has found evidence that the global patterns of distribution of biodiversity coincide significantly with the patterns of distribution of linguistic diversity (as representative of cultural diversity as a whole).
View a global map of the correlation between linguistic and biological diversity.
Biocultural Diversity in Crisis
But biocultural diversity is in serious jeopardy. It is apparent that many of the same socioeconomic and political factors, such as economic globalization, overexploitation of natural resources, and growing worldwide sociocultural homogenization, are negatively impacting on all forms of diversity. The current biodiversity extinction crisis is well known. But a comparable, and converging, crisis is affecting the world’s cultures, and particularly the diversity and richness of languages. There are currently around 6,000 oral languages in use around the world—and the total number of languages may go up to over 10,000 if Deaf languages are included (which are commonly ignored in cataloguing the world’s languages). Furthermore, linguistic diversity encompasses dialects, registers, specialized lexicons, and the linguistic ecologies in which forms of speech live. Many of these languages and forms of speech have disappeared in recent decades or are at grave risk of extinction. Some are actively suppressed by hostile governments; others are being replaced by larger languages spoken by politically and economically more dominant cultures. Unless action is taken to support and foster linguistic diversity, some scholars have estimated that perhaps 50% of the extant oral languages — conceivably as many as 90% — may become extinct, or doomed to extinction, as native tongues by the end of the century. With the languages, also at risk are the many forms of knowledge, wisdom, and world views developed by the world’s diverse peoples in response to the challenges of survival, adaptation, and satisfaction of human material and spiritual needs.
Global Significance
It is well known that a diversity of species lends stability and resilience to the world's natural ecosystems. Terralingua thinks that a diversity of languages and cultures does the same for human ecosystems — and that natural and human ecosystems are intimately, indeed inextricably interrelated. So are, we believe, the consequences of diversity loss: a monolithic global human culture is not good for biological communities; likewise, depauperate flora and fauna are not good for human communities. And loss of ecosystem health has profound consequences for human biophysical, psychological, social, and cultural health—and vice versa. Everybody should care about the loss of our life-support systems, in nature and culture. And everybody should care about the abuses and the human rights (including linguistic human rights) violations that are at the root of much of this loss. Join Terralingua in working for biocultural diversity worldwide!