The SIL Ethnologue lists 516 out of 6,912 living languages inventorized (7.5%) as "nearly extinct", indicating cases where "only a few elderly speakers are still living". This includes 210 Pacific languages, 170 American languages, 78 Asian languages, 46 African languages and 12 European languages. Another interesting fact about endangered languages is in order to judge if a language is endangered, the number of speakers is less important than the age distribution; An example of this can be seen in Indonesia where it is reported that there are languages with as many as two million native speakers alive now, but all of advancing age, with little or no transmission to the young. So here, the young, the children matter the most and the transmission of a language on to the next generation is very important. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will go extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years.
From tomorrow for the last 2 days we will see something on extinct languages of the world.
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