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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] The lists are organized by region.
Dialects of a language can also die, contributing to the overall language death. For example, the Ainu language is slowly dying: "The UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger lists Hokkaido Ainu as critically endangered with 15 speakers ... and both Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu as extinct."
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 .
Many languages, for example some in Indonesia, have tens of thousands of speakers but are endangered because children are no longer learning them, and speakers are shifting to using the national language (e.g. Indonesian) in place of local languages. In contrast, a language with only 500 speakers might be considered very much alive if it is the ...
UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger categories: This is a list of lists of extinct languages. By group. By continent. List of extinct languages of Africa ...
Eteocypriot writing, Amathous, Cyprus, 500–300 BC, Ashmolean Museum. An extinct language or dead language is a language with no living native speakers. [1] [2] A dormant language is a dead language that still serves as a symbol of ethnic identity to an ethnic group; these languages are often undergoing a process of revitalisation. [3]
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes a dead language . A language may be endangered in one area but show signs of revitalisation in another, as with the Irish language .
For historical forms of languages that evolved into more modern forms, see historical language. language portal Though the languages on these lists have no direct spoken descendant, some such as the Anglo-Norman language heavily influenced the development of a spoken language; in the case of Anglo-Norman, Middle English and Modern English ...