Every Dying Language Is a Library Burning
My grandmother spoke a Bengali I can barely understand now—words that taste like old coins in my mouth when I attempt them, phrases that carry the weight of a Bangladesh that exists only in her generation’s memory. When she died, whole dictionaries died with her. Words for specific types of rain, for the particular loneliness of monsoon afternoons, for emotions that modern Bengali has no efficient way to express.
Every dying language is a library burning.
I found her prayer book after the funeral, margins filled with vocabulary I recognize but cannot use. Words for stages of grief that English collapses into the single inadequate term “sad.” Bengali phrases that distinguish between the missing of someone who is away and someone who is dead, between regret for things done and remorse for things left undone.
These weren’t just different words for the same experiences—they were different ways of understanding what experience could be. Each untranslatable term represented a unique method of parsing reality, a specific lens through which the universe revealed different aspects of itself.
Language doesn’t just describe the world—it creates the worlds we’re capable of inhabiting.
My son asks me to teach him the Bengali my grandmother spoke, but I realize I can only offer him the diluted version I inherited—Bengali already infected with English concepts, hybrid words that belong fully to neither language. I am a broken telephone between generations, receiving rich signals and transmitting impoverished ones.
The Bengali he learns from me will be even further removed from the original, like a photocopy of a photocopy, each generation losing resolution until the original image becomes unrecognizable. We are witnessing linguistic evolution in fast-forward, entire worldviews disappearing within the span of three generations.
When my mother died, I lost not just her physical presence but access to certain ways of thinking that can only exist in the language she carried. Her particular dialect contained philosophical distinctions that vanished with her voice. Ways of understanding family relationships, spiritual concepts, emotional states that simply don’t translate into the languages that survive her.
We are all refugees from the countries of our grandparents’ vocabularies.
I think about the Indigenous languages disappearing daily from the earth, taking with them not just communication systems but entire methods of understanding time, relationship, identity. Each extinct language represents a unique experiment in human consciousness, a particular way of organizing reality that can never be replicated.
The Pirahã people of the Amazon have no words for exact numbers beyond two, no linguistic way to discuss the distant past or future. Their language keeps them anchored in the immediate present in ways that speakers of other languages can barely comprehend. When this language dies—and it’s dying—we lose not just vocabulary but a entire way of being human in time.
In the Scottish Highlands, Gaelic contains dozens of words for different types of wind, each carrying specific information about weather patterns, seasonal changes, the relationship between landscape and atmosphere. When Gaelic dies, we lose this precision of environmental observation, this intimate vocabulary of place.
Every language is a unique solution to the problem of being human.
But the sadness isn’t just about ancient languages disappearing into history books. It’s about the living languages we’re losing in our own lives, the private vocabularies that exist between family members, couples, communities of shared experience.
My wife and I have developed our own micro-language over fifteen years—words that mean specific things only to us, references that carry the weight of shared history, expressions that evolved from particular moments in our relationship. When one of us dies, this language will die too, taking with it irreplaceable ways of understanding our particular form of love.
Every couple creates its own dialect, every family its own folklore of meaning. These intimate languages carry irreplaceable information about what it means to be human in relationship, but they rarely survive beyond the people who speak them.
The most profound languages are the ones that exist between just two people.
My son is growing up trilingual—Bengali from me, English from school, and the global digital language of memes, abbreviations, and cultural references I can barely follow. He switches between these languages effortlessly, but I worry about what gets lost in translation, what concepts exist in one language that cannot survive the journey to another.
When he speaks Bengali with me, he often pauses to ask for English words because the Bengali ones feel inadequate to his experience. When he speaks English at school, he sometimes reaches for Bengali concepts that have no English equivalent. He is living in the spaces between languages, creating new hybrid meanings to fill the gaps where pure translation fails.
This is how languages evolve and die simultaneously—through the beautiful, heartbreaking process of adaptation. Each generation creates new ways of meaning while allowing old ones to fade into obsolescence.
What languages are you carrying that exist nowhere else? What words live only in your mouth, will die only with your voice? And what worlds will become impossible to inhabit when those words finally fall silent?
The sadness of losing languages is ultimately the sadness of losing ways of being human that can never be recovered. But perhaps there’s also hope in recognizing that every conversation we have, every intimate vocabulary we develop, every unique way we learn to express the inexpressible, represents a small act of linguistic creation—new worlds being born even as old ones disappear.