According to the Linguistic Society of America, 6,703 languages were spoken in the world in 1996. Of these, 1,000 were spoken in the Americas, 2,011 in Africa, 225 in Europe, 2,165 in Asia, and 1,320 in the Pacific, including Australia. However, their official website says that a lot of their information could be outdated.
Currently, there are over 5,000 languages in the world, as per the website. However, many of these languages may become extinct by the end of the century. The number is said to be decreasing as many of the world’s languages are dying and making way for more global ones such as English, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, Arabic, Swahili and Hindi.
About 80 per cent of the world’s languages are spoken only in their country of origin and almost all of the endangered ones are specific to a single area.
In 1492, the year Columbus first crossed the Atlantic, around 300 languages were spoken in the region that is now the United States, as stated by www.worldwatch.org. Today, only five of them have more than 10,000 speakers. Of the 260 native tongues still spoken in the US and Canada, 80 per cent are no longer being learned by children.
In Asia, more than half of the native languages have less than 10,000 speakers, despite the fact that the continent is home to 3 billion people. The list of endangered Asian languages include Onge, the language spoken by a traditional fishing community of 96 people on the Andaman Islands.
In Africa, where 30 per cent of the world’s languages arise, 54 languages are believed to be dead while another 116 are near extinction. Among the languages that have already been lost are Aasáx, which was spoken by a group of hunters in northern Tanzania until 1976.
In Europe, the language Manx, which was once spoken on the Isle of Man, went extinct in 1974 with the death of its last speaker.
