On December 29, 2003, Marja Sergina died on the Kola Peninsula of Russia. She likely lived much of her life on this windswept landscape, hemmed in on three sides by frigid arctic seas and with only the island of Svalbard further north. She lived through Soviet occupation and collectivization, persevering long enough to see the rise of a new democratic Russia. In the grand scheme of history, her life and death were largely unremarkable, aside from the fact that when she passed, she took an entire language with her.
Sergina spoke a language called Akkala Sami. It’s part of a family of languages, Sami, that are spoken in the northern regions of Sweden, Finland, and Russia, and one with origins dating back much earlier than the countries in which it exists. Akkala Sami lies on a spectrum, called a dialect continuum, where the languages within the family are understandable for speakers of different branches, but are different enough to be considered separate languages. There are around ten different languages on this spectrum in the Sami family, a number that used to be higher.
Language death is a growing concern. It is estimated that while there are only a little over two-hundred different countries on Earth, there are over six thousand languages spoken. Distinct languages arise out of geographic dispersion and barriers, where peoples who speak a common language are separated and the language develops differently, or where people develop different languages as they can’t have a common one. As our communications technologies improve and nation states require business to be transacted in a common language or languages, these regional languages that developed due to geographic impediment lose ground to the more practical national languages.
Death for a language occurs as the speakers migrate to a new language, or when children are taught the common language and only parents retain knowledge of the original tribal language. In the case of Akkala Sami, the tribal languages of the Sami people of northern Russia were suppressed intentionally by the Soviet government as a way of encouraging the collaboration necessary for communism to thrive throughout their country. When no one is allowed to speak a language, it isn’t learned by new speakers anymore, and as the people who know it already grow old an die, so does the language.
While Marja Sergina was symbolically the last speaker of Akkala Sami, the language actually died before she did. A language’s usefulness and life comes from the ability to use it to communicate thoughts and ideas. When the second to last person to speak Akkala Sami passed away Sergina had no one to speak with and the language then died when its usefulness as a tool ran out. And while they are tools, languages are also a glimpse into our minds and the way we think. Each language has its own way of describing phenomena and concepts, and while human thought is extinguished as the thinkers pass on, language carries on and provides insight into how those people viewed the world. But, as we have seen with Akkala Sami, sometimes languages die too.