This TED Talk features language preserver Daniel Boghry Udell, recorded live at TED Residency 2019.

Languages don't just die naturally. People abandon mother tongues because they're forced to.

Often the pressure is political. In 1892, the U.S. Army General Richard Henry Pratt

argued that killing indigenous cultures was the only alternative to killing indigenous people.

Kill the Indian, he said, but save the man. And until 1978, the government did just that, removing indigenous children

from their families and forcing them into boarding schools where they were given English names

and punished for speaking their languages. Assimulation was a compliment to genocide.

7,000 languages are alive today,

but few are recognized by their own governments or supported online.

So for people from the vast majority of cultures,

globalization remains profoundly alienating.

It means giving up your language for someone else's.

And if nothing changes, as many as 3,000 languages could disappear in 80 years.

But things are changing.

Around the world, people are reviving ancestral languages and rebuilding their cultures.

As far as we know, language reclamation began in the 1800s, when, at a time of rising anti-Semitism, Jewish communities looked to their ancestral language Hebrew

as a means of cultural revival. And though it had been dormant for over a thousand years, it was

well preserved in books of Jewish religion and philosophy.

So Jewish activists studied and taught it to their children, raising the first native speakers in nearly 100 generations.

Today, it's the mother tongue of five million Jews.

And at least for me, an assimilated English-speaking member of the Jewish diaspora,

a pillar of cultural sovereignty.

...