Linguists across the world believe that close to half of the 7,000 spoken languages will fade away by the end of the century. A language is termed ‘Endangered’ when it is no longer encouraged within its community and is not passed on to the younger generation.

Languages die when their speakers cease to speak them. While languages have always emerged and vanished over time, today’s rate of endangerment is alarming. About 50% of the world’s population speaks one of the top twenty languages — Chinese, English, Hindi/Urdu and Spanish among them — each with over 50 million speakers, while the rest is spread thin across thousands of small communities. This uneven concentration of economic, political, social and cultural power steadily accelerates the loss of linguistic diversity.

Endangered languages reflect a shifting demographic profile — the mean age of speakers rises as only the older generation continues to use the language, while younger members gradually adopt the dominant regional or national tongue, a process known as language shift. This shift can unfold rapidly across a generation or two, or quietly over many, often through unstable bilingualism in which one language eventually replaces the roles the heritage language once played.