The World's Disappearing Languages

"Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth—many of them never yet recorded—will likely disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and how the human brain works."

National Geographic has an interesting interactive map highlighting areas of the world where languages are disappearing and has plenty of interesting facts. Did you know that Nigeria has 500 different languages - 5% of the world's languages.

See also: Languages Die, but Not Their Last Words

Comments

[Kate]

As a Welsh girl, I understand the need to maintain a culture's own language, however this was always going to be the result of globalization. With so much relying on communication across the world, many of these native languages in small communities were bound to die out due to, quite frankly, the language being unnecessary.

Its sad, but its just a fact of life. Would be nice to think there are enough people from each of these communities to keep it going, but not everyone has the resources to raise a bilingual population.