language extinction
Linguists estimate that there are 6,809 "living" languages in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and some languages are even rarer 46 are known to have just one native speaker. "There are 357 languages with under 50 speakers. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than commoner ones," Professor Sutherland said.
By applying the same principles used to classify the risk to birds and mammals, Professor Sutherland demonstrated that languages were subject to similar forces of extinction.
Posted by xtop at May 14, 2003 11:29 PM
