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Roque (2002) notes the likelihood that many languages like this will disappear, at least as a spoken language that is used in everyday discourse, though some may be preserved because they are recorded and analyzed before they disappear. She notes,
Experts generally consider a community language to be 'endangered" when at least 30 per cent of the children no longer learn it. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reports that about half of the approximately 6,000 languages spoken in the world are under threat, seriously endangered or dying. According to the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing, languages have died out and disappeared at a dramatic and steadily increasing pace in many parts of the world, especially in the Americas and Australia, over the past three centuries (Roque, 2002, p. 18).
Linguists note the reasons why languages die out, and one such reason has been globalization, which makes certain major languages the language of commerce. Also, national education programs tend to promote the majority language and to stamp out minor languages (Marlett, 2000, p. 611). Various scholarly projects are under way to try to preserve languages by recording the remaining speakers and by writing grammars for those languages. Some see the Internet as a force helping preserve languages as minority speakers are using the Internet to chronicle their language. Peter Austin, director of the Endangered Languages Academic Programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, note this trend:
Many minority groups are now taking advantage of this freedom to document literature,...
Several sites now support the Hawaiian language, which, until a few years ago, was in a very dire situation, with less than 0.1 per cent of the population being able to speak it, says Austin. "Now they've digitized and uploaded a huge number of books and other materials published in the 19th century that fell out of print years ago and was virtually impossible to find," he says. "In doing so, they've made it completely open and accessible to anyone who wants to study the language" (Furniss, 2007, pp. 53-54).
Languages are threatened when there are fewer and fewer speakers of that language, but they can also be threatened by government education policies, the demands of business, language requirements by missionaries, and other such forces. Many current languages may not last beyond 2050 as the last speakers die off, ad many others may not last until the end of the century.
Efforts are being made to preserve many of these languages before that happens.
References
Furniss, C. (2007, April). Modern Languages: More Than Half of the World's Languages Could Be Extinct by the End of the Century, and Many May Not Last beyond 2050. But an Unikely Saviour Is at Hand Far from Bringing about Cultural Homogenisation, as Many Had Predicted, the Internet Seems to Be Keeping Endangered Languages Alive. Geographical, Volume 79, Issue 4, 53-55.
Marlett, S.A. (2000). Why the Seri Language Is Important and Interesting. Journal of the Southwest, Volume 42, Issue 3, 611.
Mayton, J. (2006, April). A Dying Language. The Middle East, Issue 366, 60-61.
Roque, H. (2002). Will Children Inherit All Our Languages?. UN Chronicle, Volume 39, Issue 2, 18.
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