Endangered languages

What is an endangered language?
Endangered languages are languages that are on the brink of extinction, much like endangered species of plants or animals. Languages are considered to be endangered when parents are no longer teaching the language to their children and are not using it actively in everyday life. A language is considered to be nearly extinct when it is spoken by only a few elderly native speakers.

The world faces enormous challenges in maintaining language diversity. Of the more than 6,912 languages, half may be in danger of disappearing in the next several decades, although this figure cannot be verified.

Among factors that contribute to language endangerment are small number of speakers, their ages, whether or not children are using the language, the regular use of other languages, feelings of ethnic identity and attitudes about their language, urban drift of the younger population, government policies, language(s) used in education, as well as availability of jobs. A language may also lack important factors that contribute to survival such as an alphabet, a body of literature, and people who read and write it. A language may also lack prestige and support of its speakers (Ethnologue).

The survival of a language is also threatened when speakers move to other areas where different languages are spoken, or when government policies promote the use of a specific language in school, official business and the media. These situations encourage people to learn the wider-known language and may cause them, especially the young, to stop using their mother tongue. Often those speaking lesser-known languages will choose to learn a more prestigious language with the hope of greater economic opportunities. In many parts of the world parents are teaching their children English, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Russian or some other dominant language instead of their own language for social and economic reasons.

Below is data on the world's smallest languages (Ethnologue). As you can see, 1,619 (or 23%) of all world languages are spoken by fewer than half-a-million people, 548 (about 8%) of the world's languages are spoken by fewer than 100 people, and 204 (or 3%) of all world languages are spoken by fewer than 10 people.

Population range
100 to 999
10 to 99
1 to 9

Number of languages
1,071
344
204
1,619

Number of speakers
457,022
13,163
698
470,883

What is a "nearly extinct" language?
516 of the languages listed in Ethnologue are classified as nearly extinct because they are spoken by only a few elderly speakers. Below are the numbers of nearly extinct areas by major world areas.

The Pacific
The Americas
Asia
Africa
Europe
Total

210
170
78
46
12
516

What is being done to preserve dying languages?
The Foundation for Endangered Languages supports the documentation, protection and promotion of endangered languages. Scholars know that they need to record and analyse these languages before they disappear off the face of the earth. Since only about one-third of the world languages have writing systems, once these languages disappear, we will have no record of them and their cultural heritage which will disappear forever along with the loss of their speakers' knowledge of the environment and of medicinal plants. For languages that cannot be saved, it is still possible to document them for scientific purposes and for the sake of future generations who might want to study or even revive them.

Why try to preserve endangered languages?
Wouldn't the world be simpler if there were fewer languages? Why care if languages die out? The truth is that a people's identity and culture are intimately tied to their language. Each language is unique. No one knows what riches may be hidden within an endangered language. We may never learn about the cultures whose languages have disappeared. And the wholesale loss of languages that we face today will greatly restrict how much we can learn about human culture, human cognition and the nature of language.

Success Stories

Language preservation is difficult, but there are some success stories. Some languages are literally coming back from the dead. Below are just a few of them:

Hawaiian
Hawaiian had become nearly extinct when the U.S. banned schools from teaching students in Hawaiian after annexing Hawaii in 1898. Today, close to 10,000 Hawaiians speak their native tongue as compared to under 1,000 in 1983. This remarkable resurgence is supported in part by the use of technology.

Hebrew
Hebrew evolved in the past century from a written language with no native speakers into Israel's national tongue, spoken by 5 million people.

Irish Gaelic
The Irish have succeeded in preserving their native Gaelic to the point where it is now spoken by 13% of the population of the Republic of Ireland.