How Many Languages Are Endangered?

Numbers Guy reader Sabahat Chaudhary noticed the recent spate of press coverage claiming that half of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered, with one dying every two weeks. the Associated Press and Reuters all reported these alarming statistics, released by linguists associated with the Enduring Voices project, which aims to preserve and document languages.But not all these threatened languages face equal risks. Linguists do agree that hundreds of languages are nearly certain to expire in the next few decades, but many of the other roughly 3,500 languages defined as endangered have a much better shot. These include languages still spoken regularly in small but stable communities, but considered “endangered” because a natural disaster might wipe out the speakers. Other languages, such as Sora in Eastern India, are defined as “endangered” because city dwellers have shifted away from them, though rural speakers haven’t.

That eye-catching one-in-two-weeks estimate, meanwhile, is an extrapolation from the number of languages that are endangered and expected to fall out of use in the next century, Gregory Anderson, co-director of Enduring Voices, told me. It’s usually hard to pin down precisely when a language is no more — defined as the moment when the last known native speaker has died. So Enduring Voices, which is backed by the National Geographic Society, estimated that if most of the 2,800 to 3,500 endangered languages (roughly 40% to 50% of all languages) do die in the next century, that works out to about one language lost every two weeks.

These are estimates in a field where exact numbers are difficult to pin down. First, defining a language compared with a dialect is difficult. Two people generally are speaking in dialects if they can understand each other, but Catalan and Spanish qualify as separate languages even though there is generally mutual intelligibility. The distinctions “don’t always jive with socially perceived language barriers that exist in some communities,” Dr. Anderson said. Nonetheless, linguists generally agree that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages in the world — nearly half of them in two diverse language groups, the Austronesian (mainly from Pacific islands) and Niger-Congo. Establishing the extent of language usage is also tricky; relying on national censuses doesn’t suffice because many countries don’t conduct regular counts, and those that do may not report languages spoken by fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, Dr. Anderson said.

The Enduring Voices project, therefore, focused on those regions of the world with the most endangered languages: so-called language hot spots such as central Siberia and northern Australia. “We don’t have a list of all of the endangered languages,” Dr. Anderson told me. “We have those in the language hot spots.” He estimates those number about 2,500. The project’s linguists believes there are hundreds more that are endangered outside the hot spots, hence the estimate that nearly 50% of all languages are at risk.

Identifying the hot spots and grading the languages on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning certain extinction and 5 meaning safe, was an ambitious undertaking. The group culled “every possible published and unpublished source and report and the personal knowledge of colleagues to try to come up with a semi-definitive, verifiable list of these languages,” Dr. Anderson said. He added, “The numbers are backed by research. They are not just invented.”

Another way to look at the numbers suggests only 10% of all languages are facing certain extinction. That’s the percentage of all languages that were classified by Enduring Voices researchers at level 1 or 1.5. That is close to an estimate of 516 “nearly extinct” languages by SIL International, a Dallas-based Christian organization that aims to prevent language extinction. SIL considers a language nearly extinct when “only a few elderly speakers are still living.”