The rising ocean will extinguish more than land. It will kill entire languages.As the climate crisis forces migration, so native tongues wither, too. But it’s not too late to intervene.  Anastasia Riehl Rising sea levels already pose an existential threat to the populations of Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and other low-lying Pacific atolls. In these places, however, it is not just homes, crops and community cohesiveness that are at risk: it is Tuvaluan, Kiribati and Marshallese – the languages native to these islands. The impact of the climate crisis on languages may be new, but the relationship between language and climate is old. As humans populated the Earth, climate and geography were enormous factors in where they settled and flourished. The equatorial region, with its consistent temperatures, predictable rainfall and abundant agricultural opportunities, was particularly agreeable. Humans thrived in these areas – inhabiting a valley here, an islet there – giving rise to thousands of different communities, and with them thousands of different languages.Today, vastly more of the world’s languages are spoken in the tropics than at higher latitudes. It is not just humans and languages that have prospered in nurturing climates but species of all kinds. Research on biocultural diversity finds striking parallels between the evolution of species and languages. Where a new species rooted and blossomed, so did a language. Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today, 70% are concentrated in only 25% of the Earth’s land area – precisely in those areas with the highest biodiversity. Unfortunately, this shared fate binds them in birth as well as death, with both species and languages facing extinction crises.If the story of climate and language has long been one of harmony, the climate crisis is the plot twist. In a tragic reversal, it is precisely those areas of the Earth that were the most hospitable to people and languages, to species of all kinds, that are now becoming the least hospitable. The climate called us in, and now the climate is casting us out.  The speakers will leave their islands before that happens. In fact, a changing climate, whether through rising seas, drought or catastrophic storms, will probably never be the sole culprit in a language’s death. Rather, the threat of the climate emergency is the threat of forced migration. As a population is compelled to abandon its lands and move into a new community – a neighbouring village, a refugee camp, an urban centre – its Indigenous language becomes harder to sustain. To make matters worse, a crisis of language loss was well underway even before global temperatures began to rise. More than half of the world’s languages are already considered endangered, with the most pessimistic estimates putting the figure at 90%. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/28/indigenous-languages-climate-crisis-threat-pacific-islands