Lists of

endangered languages An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead lan ...

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

* List of endangered languages in Africa

Asia

List of endangered languages in Asia An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. A language may be endangered in one area but show si ...

* List of endangered languages in Bangladesh *

List of endangered languages in China An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. UNESCO defines four levels of language en ...

List of endangered languages in India An endangered language is a language that is at a risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. UNESCO defines four levels of language end ...

List of endangered languages in Indonesia An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. UNESCO defines Endangered language#UNESCO defin ...

* List of endangered languages in Nepal

Europe

List of endangered languages in Europe An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. A language may be endangered in one area but show ...

List of endangered languages in Russia An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. A language may be endangered in one area but show ...

North America

* List of endangered languages in North America * List of endangered languages in Canada * List of endangered languages in Mexico * List of endangered languages in the United States

Central and South America

* List of endangered languages in Central America *

List of endangered languages in South America An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. UNESCO defines four levels of language en ...

* List of endangered languages in Brazil *

List of endangered languages in Colombia An endangered language is a language that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Sci ...

Oceania

List of Australian Aboriginal languages There are numerous Australian Aboriginal languages and dialects, many of which are endangered. An endangered language is one that it is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its nativ ...

* List of endangered languages in Papua New Guinea * List of endangered languages of the Pacific

Discussion

SIL Ethnologue (2005) lists 473 out of 6,909 living languages inventorized (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 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 Ladin may refer to: *Ladin language, a language in northern Italy, often classified as a Rhaeto-Romance language *Ladin people, the inhabitants of the Dolomite Alps region of northern Italy See also *Laden (disambiguation) *Ladino (disambiguati ...

speakers left, almost all children still learn it as their mother tongue; thus Ladin is not currently endangered. Similarly, the Hawaiian language has only about 1,000 speakers, but it has stabilized 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.

References

External links

*
EndangeredLanguages.com
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Endangered languages