Speakers of endangered languages are people who, by and large, have been the most marginalised; the victims of imperialism, colonialism and market expansion. So, it’s a matter of justice that we address this diversity that was such a key part of our planet, but now faces disappearance, just like the diversity of the biological world.”

The Endangered Language Alliance has already worked with speakers in more than 70 languages, hailing from the Caribbean to the Middle East. In some cases, they support active revitalisation efforts within communities and encourage native speakers to teach compatriots, such as hosting classes on the Mayan language K’iche’. But many times it means initiating a last-ditch effort to document as much of the language as possible before all of its fluent speakers are gone.

A key priority for the organisation is the belief that indigenous peoples with resilient languages and cultures may be better able to defend themselves against the ongoing tyranny of larger monocultures, and that children learn better in their mother tongue, with the ideal being multilingualism, which brings such cognitive and cultural benefits.

Perlin is coming to the Teachers’ Club in Dublin on July 25th to address the Department of Ultimology, an art project exploring the afterlife of dead and dying things, run by artist Fiona Hallinan and curator Kate Strain. The focus of Perlin’s presentation will be the afterlife of languages, and how the concept of an idealised last speaker who serves as a charismatic symbol of language death is rarely that clear cut.

“Languages linger in myriad ways,” he says, “and are even sometimes resuscitated by a single impassioned activist, such as Jessie Little Doe Baird, who revived an Algonquian language, Wampanoag, after 150 years of extinction. She used old documents that had survived. Now, with the internet, the materials are stored and somehow sleeping, potentially subject to a form of de-extinction, as they call it in biology.”