The Words We Were Losing

By Kira Tanaka, Culture & Language Reporter -- The Kadmiel Chronicle I found out two weeks ago that we have eleven fluent speakers of Yoruba left in the colony. Eleven. Out of forty-three thousand people. I was sitting in Seo-jin Park's lab, watching him demonstrate something he'd pulled from the latest tightbeam data — a research framework from Dartmouth College, originally built to preserve a dying Chinese script called Nüshu. The researchers had managed to teach an AI to translate into a language it had never been trained on, using just thirty-five sentence pairs. Thirty-five. Not thirty-five thousand. Thirty-five. I was supposed to be impressed by the technical achievement. I was. But what I couldn't stop thinking about was the number eleven. Here's the thing nobody tells you about a colony this small: languages die faster than you'd expect. We brought thirty-five languages with us on the three ships. I remember this because I reported on it in Year 3 — a celebration piece for the