Lists of endangered languages are mainly based on
the definitions used by UNESCO. In order to be listed, a language must be classified as "
endangered" in a cited academic source. Researchers have concluded that in less than one hundred years, almost half of the languages known today will be lost forever.
The lists are organized by region.
Africa
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List of endangered languages in Africa
Asia
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List of endangered languages in Asia
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List of endangered languages in Bangladesh
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List of endangered languages in China
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List of endangered languages in India
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List of endangered languages in Indonesia
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List of endangered languages in Nepal
Europe
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List of endangered languages in Europe
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List of endangered languages in Russia
North America
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List of endangered languages in North America
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List of endangered languages in Canada
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List of endangered languages in Mexico
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List of endangered languages in the United States
Central and South America
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List of endangered languages in Central America
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List of endangered languages in South America
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List of endangered languages in Brazil
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List of endangered languages in Colombia
Oceania
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List of Australian Aboriginal languages
A list is a Set (mathematics), set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of t ...
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List of endangered languages in Papua New Guinea
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List of endangered languages of Oceania
Discussion
SIL Ethnologue (2005) lists 473 out of 6,909 living languages inventorised (6.8%) as "nearly extinct", indicating cases where "only a few elderly speakers are still living"; this figure dropped to 6.1% as of 2013.
When judging whether or not a language is endangered, the number of speakers is less important than their age distribution. There are languages in
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...
reported with as many as two million native speakers alive now, but all of advancing age, with little or no transmission to the young. On the other hand, while there are only 30,000
Ladin speakers left, almost all children still learn it as their mother tongue; thus Ladin is not currently endangered. Similarly, the
Hawaiian language
Hawaiian (', ) is a critically endangered Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family, originating in and native to the Hawaiian Islands. It is the native language of the Hawaiian people. Hawaiian, along with English, is an offi ...
has only about 1,000 speakers, but it has stabilised at this number, and there is now school instruction in the language, from preschool through the 12th grade; thus the language is classified as merely vulnerable.
While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will become extinct within the next 50 to 100 years.
See also
* ''
Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger''
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Language family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term ''family'' is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics ...
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Language policy
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Linguistic rights
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Lists of extinct languages
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List of languages by time of extinction
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List of revived languages
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Minority language
References
External links
*
EndangeredLanguages.com*
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Endangered languages