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An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. [1] Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead language ".
Lists of endangered languages are mainly based on the definitions used by UNESCO. In order to be listed, a language must be classified as " endangered " in a cited academic source. Researchers have concluded that in less than one hundred years, almost half of the languages known today will be lost forever. [ 1 ]
For many languages which have become extinct in recent centuries, attestation of usage is datable in the historical record, and sometimes the terminal speaker is identifiable. In other cases, historians and historical linguists may infer an estimated date of extinction from other events in the history of the sprachraum .
The Catalogue of Endangered Languages provides information on each of the world's currently endangered languages. It provides information on: the languages' vitality (their prospects for continued use), such as number of speakers, trends in the number of speakers, intergenerational transmission; the language's spheres of use
UNESCO flag. The UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger was an online publication containing a comprehensive list of the world's endangered languages.It originally replaced the Red Book of Endangered Languages as a title in print after a brief period of overlap before being transferred to an online-only publication.
Unclassified language; List of languages by total number of speakers; UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger categories:
According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),from facts published in their "Atlas of Languages in Danger of Disappearing", there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken worldwide today, and half of the world's population speaks the eight most common. [4]
A revived language is a language that at one point had no native speakers, but through revitalization efforts has regained native speakers.. The most frequent reason for extinction is the marginalisation of local languages within a wider dominant nation state, which might at times amount to outright political oppression.