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It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Today, saving language.

You know about endangered species, maybe donated money to save whales or polar bears,

but there's an even bigger extension crisis facing us. The world's languages are dying.

In fact, according to some estimates, we lose a language every two weeks or so.

Luckily, there are people like David Harrison, a linguist who's traveled to some of the most remote places on the planet

looking for lost languages, kind of like Indiana Jones. Steve Paulson tracked him down.

David, why are so many languages going extinct?

In a word, you could say globalization, the forces of industrialization, urbanization.

But there's a more important pressure, and that is small languages are disadvantaged.

They're disfavored.

It's partly because those of us who speak major languages don't really appreciate the knowledge

base that is found in small languages. And so the speakers of those languages, eventually they

internalize those negative attitudes and they start to devalue their own languages.

And you're losing a whole set of knowledge, tradition, history, mythology, wisdom that simply cannot be directly translated or transferred over into English.

So this is more than just saving words.

I mean, you're talking about saving a way of life, a whole body of knowledge.

It's an immense body of knowledge. It's scientific knowledge. It's cultural knowledge.

You know, we maybe think that we know everything we need to know and that we can Google everything

or look everything up. But I've had the privilege of walking through the Australian outback

with elders. I've walked through the Australian outback with elders,

...