Endangered Languages and Linguistic Extinction

In a widely cited 1992 article in the journal Language titled "The World's Languages in Crisis," the linguist Michael Krauss estimated that of the world's then roughly 6,000 languages, as few as 600, or about 10 percent, could be considered "safe" from extinction in the sense of being likely to still be widely spoken and transmitted to children a century later, implying that the remaining 90 percent were vulnerable, in decline, or already moribund. Krauss's estimate galvanized a wave of documentary linguistics and revitalization funding in the decades that followed, even as some linguists have since questioned the precision of the underlying figures, arguing that the true proportion at risk is genuinely difficult to establish given how unevenly language vitality has been surveyed across regions, and that trends vary enormously between, for instance, the extreme fragility of many languages in Australia and the Americas and the comparatively more secure position of many minority languages in parts of Africa and South Asia. The core empirical picture that a large majority of languages are spoken by shrinking and aging communities relative to just a handful of dominant world languages, however, is not itself in serious dispute.