Endangered Languages

The world has lost Manx in the Isle of Man, Ubykh in Turkey and last year Alaska's last native speaker of Eyak, Marie Smith Jones, died, taking the aboriginal language with her.

Of the 6,900 languages spoken in the world, some 2,500 are endangered, the UN's cultural agency UNESCO said Thursday as it released its latest atlas of world languages...

There are 199 languages in the world spoken by fewer than a dozen people, including Karaim which has six speakers in Ukraine and Wichita, spoken by 10 people in the US state of Oklahoma...

India tops the list of countries with the greatest number of endangered languages, 196 in all, followed by the United States which stands to lose 192 and Indonesia, where 147 are in peril. (Yahoo.com)

So, what is the impact of a language being lost? Clearly, language is an important part of culture and so with the loss of a language, the world loses part of the global cultural heritage.

On the other hand, how do you keep these languages alive? People must not be passing them to the next generation because they are not useful. I remember reading years ago that these languages are largely lost to languages linked to political or economic power, like English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic...