Of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren’t spoken by the children. In one generation, we’re going to halve our cultural diversity.

Borges is pointing to language shift as a measurable indicator of cultural loss: when children stop learning a community’s language, the language is on a path to extinction. By pairing a global statistic with a one-generation timeline, he frames language endangerment as an urgent, human-scale crisis rather than an abstract academic concern. The claim that cultural diversity will be “halved” underscores that languages carry unique histories, ecological knowledge, oral literature, and ways of seeing the world; their disappearance reduces the range of human expression and memory. The quote also implicitly critiques modernization and globalization pressures that incentivize dominant languages at the expense of minority ones.