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Endangered Languages

There are around 7,000 languages in the world today. However, most people speak the largest languages: Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, and others. So what about the smaller languages? According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, around one-third of the world’s languages now have fewer than 1,000 speakers. We may soon lose those languages completely. In fact, 230 languages became “extinct” between 1950 and 2010.

Unfortunately, when we lose a language, we also lose its culture and knowledge. That's because people in different places have different ways of living and thinking. One example of this is the Tuvan language of southem Siberia. Tuvan people depend on animals for food and other basic needs. Their language shows this close connection between people and animals. The Tuvan word ezenggileer, for example, means “to sing with the rhythms of riding a horse.” And the word ak byzaa is “a white calf less than one year old.”

In some places, people are working to save traditional languages. Many schools in New Zealand now teach the Maori language. This helps connect native New Zealanders to their Maori culture. And Welsh is spoken by around 500,000 people in Wales. The Welsh government is working to increase that number to one million by 2050. Technology could be another way to save endangered languages. National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project has created “Talking Dictionaries” - the recorded voices of people communicating with each other. All of them are fluent speakers of endangered languages. And because these dictionaries are available to anyone on the Internet, people now and in the future can leam some of the vocabulary, greetings, and grammar rules of past languages.

extinct (adj) a language is extinct when it has no living speakers

rhythm (n) a regular series of sounds or movements

calf (n) a young cow

endangered (adj) in danger of soon becoming extinct