No One to Talk To

Guess how many languages in the United States are in danger of becoming extinct.

According to UNESCO, there are 40 languages in the US that are critically endangered and have less than 10 speakers living. A total of 54 languages in the US are already extinct.

From UNESCO...

UNESCO launched the electronic version of the new edition of its Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. This interactive digital tool provides updated data about approximately 2,500 endangered languages around the world.

It enables searches according to several criteria, and ranks the 2,500 endangered languages that are listed according to five different levels of vitality: unsafe, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct.

Some of the data are especially worrying: out of the approximately 6,000 existing languages in the world, more than 200 have become extinct during the last three generations, 538 are critically endangered, 502 severely endangered, 632 definitely endangered and 607 unsafe.

For example, 199 languages have fewer than ten speakers and 178 others have 10 to 50. Among the languages that have recently become extinct, it mentions Manx (Isle of Man), which died out in 1974 when Ned Maddrell fell forever silent, Ubykh (Turkey) in 1992 with the demise of Tevfik Esenç, and Eyak (Alaska, United States of America), in 2008 with the death of Marie Smith Jones.

To explore the interactive map, click here.