On average, a language dies about every two weeks

UNESCO estimates that a language disappears every two weeks, usually when its last fluent speakers die without passing it on. Of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today, at least 40% are endangered, many with only a handful of elderly speakers left.

When a language vanishes, more goes with it than vocabulary. Communities lose oral histories, songs, place-names and detailed knowledge of local plants, animals and weather encoded in words that have no exact translation.

Each lost language erases a unique map of human experience that took millennia to build.

The pressure comes largely from globalization: schooling, media and economic opportunity push speakers toward a few dominant languages. Some linguists warn that half or more of today’s languages could fall silent by 2100. That has spurred revitalization efforts — immersion schools, recordings and dictionaries — racing to keep endangered tongues alive before their last speakers are gone.