What does it mean to lose a language? Deep knowledge, passed down over millennia—gone. Ways of thinking about the land, the sea, the sky, and the flora and fauna that inhabit them. Rituals and recipes. Myths and memories, erased. And for those who spoke the language, it means losing a part of themselves.

It happens every three months. A language—an irreplaceable key to understanding the world—fades away. By the end of the century, as much as 90% of the world’s 6,500 languages will be gone forever.

Languages are prisms through which we look at the world. A shared understanding that binds a people together. A diversity of languages encourages a diversity of thought, of perspectives, of sense-making. Every language tells us a little bit about who we are. When a language dies, a sliver of our shared culture vanishes, and humanity is poorer for the loss.