UN Places International Law on Endangered-Languages List

The registry then asked member states to submit one sentence they could all understand in exactly the same way.

The first submission, “States shall respect,” failed verification when delegates agreed on the vocabulary but not whether “shall” described a duty, an aspiration or a decorative feature of the page. The registry marked the phrase “fluent but nonfunctional” and moved its final active copy into a glass case.

International law has kept its nouns remarkably well preserved. What it has misplaced is the habit of making the verbs do anything.

Irena Voss, a registry conservator

The search for a second speaker

Under the registry’s preservation rule, an endangered language needs two speakers who can use it to settle a disagreement. The only applicants for international law were an interpreter and a treaty lawyer, who reached opposite conclusions about the word “provisional” and were dismissed as mutually unintelligible.

By Friday, the display case held the phrase “subject to applicable law” beside an empty chair reserved for its last conversational user. Delegates continued to debate whether the chair was a seat, a symbol or a binding precedent.