What is a Language Worth? The Economics of Extinction

The idea might seem crass, but it arises from a place of urgent necessity. With one of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages disappearing every two weeks, communities are fighting for their cultural survival. In this fight, they’ve discovered that appeals to heritage and human rights don’t always resonate with policymakers and legal systems. Sometimes, the only language that gets heard is the language of money.

Why Put a Price on Priceless Heritage?

The push to assign a monetary value to a language generally comes from two distinct pressures: the courtroom and the budget meeting.

• Cultural Damages in Court: When an Indigenous community sues a government for the devastating legacy of residential schools, or a village sues a corporation for an oil spill that destroyed their traditional way of life, how is that loss quantified? Language is central to culture. Its erosion or destruction is a profound harm, and courts require a number to calculate compensation. Lawyers, therefore, turn to economists to build a case for the “economic value” of the language that was damaged.
• Securing Conservation Funding: Language revitalization is expensive. It requires creating dictionaries, training teachers, developing curricula, and running community immersion programs. When linguists and community leaders appeal to governments or NGOs for funding, they are competing with requests for roads, hospitals, and schools. Making a compelling economic case—showing that investing in language revitalization yields a tangible return—can mean the difference between getting a grant and watching a language fade away.

This approach borrows heavily from environmental economics, which has long grappled with how to value things like a pristine rainforest, a clean river, or a stable climate. If we can calculate the economic cost of cutting down a forest, perhaps we can do the same for silencing a language.

The Economist’s Toolkit: How Is a Language’s Value Calculated?

Economists have developed several methods to tackle this thorny problem. Each has its own logic and its own set of flaws.

The Replacement Cost Method

This is the most straightforward approach. It asks: what would it cost to bring the language back from the brink? This calculation includes all the practical expenses:

• Salaries for linguists to document the language.
• Costs of training a new generation of fluent speakers and teachers.
• Funds for creating learning materials like books, apps, and videos.
• The expense of running immersion schools or “language nests”.

A famous early attempt at this involved the Eyak language of Alaska. In the 1990s, linguist Michael Krauss and an economist estimated that a comprehensive revitalization program would cost several million dollars. When the last fluent speaker, Marie Smith Jones, passed away in 2008, this figure was cited to illustrate the scale of the cultural loss.

The Contingent Valuation (Willingness-to-Pay) Method

This method is more abstract. Researchers survey people—both within and outside the language community—and ask them a hypothetical question: “How much would you be willing to pay (in taxes or donations) to ensure this language survives”? The total sum from all respondents is then used to estimate the language’s total social value.

The obvious challenge is that people are not actually spending money, making their answers purely theoretical. Furthermore, can someone who has never heard a language truly grasp what is at stake enough to put a meaningful price on it?

The Well-being Approach

Perhaps the most compelling method connects language to tangible life outcomes. A growing body of research, particularly in Canada and Australia, shows a strong correlation between Indigenous language use and improved well-being. Communities with high rates of Indigenous language fluency often have:

• Lower youth suicide rates.
• Lower rates of diabetes and better health outcomes.
• Higher high school completion rates and personal income.

By speaking their ancestral language, individuals connect with their identity, community, and history, leading to greater resilience and well-being. Economists can then calculate the economic value of these positive outcomes—for example, the money saved in the healthcare system or the increased tax revenue from higher employment. In this model, language isn’t just culture; it’s a form of social and human capital.

The Uncomfortable Question: Is This Right?

Despite its practical applications, the entire enterprise of linguistic valuation is fraught with ethical dilemmas. The central criticism is that it commits the cardinal sin of commodification. It takes something sacred, intrinsic, and deeply human and reduces it to a line item on a spreadsheet.

What happens if the calculated value is low? Could a government use a low valuation to justify cutting a language program, arguing it’s not a “cost-effective investment”? This is the great fear of many communities and linguists. They are forced to play a game whose rules were designed by an economic system that has historically devalued their culture.

Furthermore, what an economic model leaves out is often what matters most. How do you assign a dollar value to a worldview? The Sámi languages of northern Europe have hundreds of words for snow and reindeer, reflecting a deep, nuanced understanding of their environment. The Pirahã language of the Amazon has challenged linguistic theories with its lack of numbers and recursion. These are not just collections of words; they are unique repositories of human knowledge and cognition. An economic valuation can never capture this richness.

A Necessary Evil?

In a perfect world, the argument that a language has a right to exist on its own terms would be enough. We would preserve linguistic diversity for the same reason we protect species: because it is a critical part of the planet’s heritage, a source of beauty, and a wellspring of untapped knowledge.

But our world is not perfect. In the cold calculus of law and policy, numbers speak louder than poetry. Linguistic valuation, for all its flaws and discomforts, offers a pragmatic tool for communities fighting for survival. It translates the ineffable loss of culture into a language that institutions can understand and act upon.

Putting a price tag on a language may feel wrong, but for many endangered languages, it might be the only price that ensures they have a future.