Speech is ancient, probably as old as our species. Writing is a recent invention, about five thousand years old, and for most of history most people could not read. This level looks at how writing works, then at languages in danger and how communities are reviving them.

Inventing writing

Writing was invented independently in at least three places: Mesopotamia, China and Mesoamerica. Whether Egypt borrowed the idea is debated. In Mesopotamia, the earliest tablets, from around 3200 BCE, are mostly accounts: records of grain, beer and livestock.

A key step was the rebus principle. The rebus principle is using a sign for its sound instead of its meaning, as if an English writer drew a bee and a leaf to spell "belief." Once a sign can stand for a sound, writing can record names, grammar and any word in the language, not just lists of things.

Kinds of writing systems

Writing systems differ in what each sign stands for. Logographic systems use signs for words or meaningful parts of words, as Chinese characters largely do. Syllabaries use one sign per syllable, as in the Japanese kana. Alphabets use signs for individual sounds. The Phoenician script wrote only consonants; the Greeks adapted it and added letters for vowels. Arabic and Hebrew still mainly write consonants.

Writing systems can also be designed. Koreans once wrote with Chinese characters, which fit Korean poorly. King Sejong and his scholars created a new alphabet, completed in 1443 and announced in 1446. Sejong explained that ordinary people had things they wished to say but could not write them down. Hangul's letter shapes reflect how sounds are made: the letter for k, for example, sketches the back of the tongue raised toward the roof of the mouth.

Sequoyah's syllabary

One of the most remarkable inventions belongs to Sequoyah, a Cherokee silversmith who could not read any language. He spent years creating a syllabary for Cherokee, completing it around 1821. Because each sign matched a familiar syllable, it was quick to learn. Within a few years a large share of the Cherokee Nation could read and write in Cherokee. By 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper in Cherokee and English, was being printed.

Languages in danger

Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today, many have only a few speakers. Researchers estimate that around 40 percent of languages are endangered.

Languages rarely die because every speaker dies at once. Languages usually die through language shift, as speakers stop passing the language on to their children. Shift often happens under pressure. In the United States, Canada and Australia, boarding schools for Indigenous children punished them for speaking their own languages. In nineteenth century Wales, some schools hung a wooden sign, the "Welsh Not," on children caught speaking Welsh.

A lost language takes with it a community's names for plants, places and kin, its stories and humor, and evidence about what human language can be. Some argue that shift is often a free choice by parents seeking opportunity for their children, and that outsiders should not romanticize it. Supporters of revival agree that choice matters and reply that many such "choices" were made under coercion, and that people can add a world language without giving up their own. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, affirms the right of Indigenous peoples to revitalize and pass on their languages.

Revival

Revival is hard but possible. Hebrew is the clearest case of a language with no native speakers becoming the everyday first language of millions. For centuries it was used for prayer and study, not as a mother tongue. In the late nineteenth century Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and others began using it at home and in schools, and today it is the main language of Israel.

Other communities rely on language nests: preschools where young children are immersed in the language with fluent elders. The Māori of New Zealand opened the first kōhanga reo in 1982, and Hawaiians soon followed. Some languages are being revived from documents alone. The Myaamia (Miami) language had no fluent speakers by the mid-twentieth century, but the scholar Daryl Baldwin and his community have brought it back into use from old records, and many speakers now call such languages "sleeping" rather than dead.

Worked example: Hawaiian

Hawaiian was once the language of a kingdom with high literacy and many Hawaiian language newspapers. In 1896, after the overthrow of the monarchy, a law required English as the medium of instruction in schools. Within a few generations, parents stopped speaking Hawaiian to their children. By the early 1980s, by commonly cited estimates, fewer than fifty children spoke it.

Then families acted. In 1983 they founded the ʻAha Pūnana Leo, a network of language nest preschools modeled on the Māori example. Hawaiian had been made an official language of the state in 1978, and in 1986 the law was changed to allow schooling in Hawaiian. Immersion schools followed, and the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo now teaches degrees in Hawaiian.

Hawaiian is still endangered, and most children in Hawaii speak English. But thousands of young people now speak it, some as a first language. The case shows writing that helped a language flourish, policy that pushed it toward shift, and a community that chose to pass it on again.