by Philip Emeagwali
emeagwali.com  

Imagine that it's the year 3010, the dawn of the fourth millennium and the start of the 31st century,
The Internet has killed the world's languages Every person speaks a language with some English words from the 21st century.

A news headline transmitted by telepathic email called t-mail  announced,
“Last Speaker of Igbo  Has Died!”
The news continues:
“Susan Okafor, the woman who was the last known native speaker of the Igbo language of Africa has died  in her home in Onitsha, Nigeria at the age of 126."
I was born in Africa and  the first words I from my father  were in the Igbo language.
The last words  my father spoke to me  were in the English language.
Before I came to America, every white person I met spoke one European language
and every black person I met spoke one African language and belonged to a tribe.
The day I first spoke to a black American is burned into my memory.
It was March 26, 1974,  in Monmouth, Oregon, and I asked the first black American  I met:
"Which tribe  do you belong to?"
He hesitated.  And so I asked:
"Which African language  do you speak?"
He could not answer.
It was as shocking to me as it would have been if all white South Africans
were fluent in Zulu and not one of them could understand a word of English.

By the dawn of the fourth millennium, humanity's 6,000 languages will mostly have disappeared.
The wisdom and knowledge embedded in each language will disappear.
The extinction of a language  is equivalent to the extinction of a biological species.
Each language has features unique to itself and, when it dies, knowledge passes from the earth that will never be found anywhere else.
 A thousand years ago, the BBC would have been broadcasting in Latin.
Today, however, Latin is virtually extinct  it's no longer anyone's native language.
Even scholars do not know how Latin was originally pronounced.
In the Middle Ages, Latin was the language of scholarship  in Europe
just as Arabic is the lingua franca  of the Middle East. I went to an all-boys Catholic boarding school in Nigeria, British West Africa.
It was run by a Catholic priest  named Thomas Kennedy
who was born in Cork, Ireland.
I learned Latin as a third language and used it as one of Thomas Kennedy's altar boys.
I was also in the church choir,  where I sang Latin songs of mourning called requiems.
Three hundred and thirty years ago,  my predecessor Isaac Newton published his discoveries  of the technique of calculus and the laws of motion  in Latin in a book called
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

As a mathematical physicist who extended Newton's discoveries from his Principia to the motherboard, reprogramming a supercomputer powered by 65,000 subcomputers
as part computer and part Internet, I found it convenient to use Latin phrases such as
ad infinitum, a posteriori and quod erat demonstrandum.
I was using a dead language that I had learned in a religious context to create knowledge that was new. I was using the same words that Newton had used in his science to describe a completely different kind of science.Perhaps, in a thousand years,
when all 21st century languages will be as dead as Latin our descendants might be relearning my Igbo language to enable them extract the wisdom and knowledge embedded into the language by my ancestors. 
At the dawn of the fourth millennium
French could be extinct  and no longer exist as France's native language.

Perhaps future generations will preserve endangered languages for posterity  by programming super-intelligent, half-human cyborgs, and teaching these cyborgs to speak them.
In a thousand years,  a linguist might write:
"A thousand years ago,
 a thousand languages were spoken  in Africa.
Today, those languages are extinct
and only spoken by half-human cyborgs.
The disappearance of Africa's languages
 has touched the human community,
 now outnumbered by cyborgs"