Endangered languages

In UNESCO’s words, linguistic diversity is “a unique heritage and treasure of Humanity”. However, very often, minority languages face varying degrees of endangerment. Generally, a language becomes endangered if the community stops teaching the language to children and speaks the dominant language to them instead. This interruption in transmission leads to the language eventually dying out. Ethnologue reports that 3,045 languages are currently endangered, although this number changes constantly.  

A personal account by Professor Peter Constantine (University of Connecticut), one of the last speakers of Arvanitika: 

When a language becomes extinct, it takes with it more than just its words to a silent grave. With it disappear millennia of culture, knowledge, and tradition. Its unique interpretation of our world unravels and dies. UNESCO warns us that 90 to 95 percent of our world’s languages will die by the end of this century. In isolated mountain villages of Greece, several non-Greek indigenous languages are still spoken—among them Arvanitika, Gagauz, Pomakika, Ponash, Vlachika—all severely endangered. When I was a child in our village in Corinth, Arvanitika was still alive, though almost everyone was shifting to Greek. Few people under eighty are able to speak the language anymore. My generation is one of terminal speakers.  

Please consider also some of the languages in our project: UNESCO’s The World Atlas of Languages classifies Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Ladin, and Rumelian Turkish as “definitely endangered”, while Catalan, Galician, and Scots are considered “potentially vulnerable”.