Crazy Literary Facts: The Death of a Language

Jeevan Sivasubramaniam Posted by Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, Managing Director, Editorial, Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc.



Most people think that a language dying is a rare thing, but the amazing truth is that it is frightfully common and very much a part of our social evolution.

National Geographic conducted the research that shows that a language dies every fourteen days on average. Usually, these languages are swallowed up by languages spoken by a larger, surrounding majority. By the next century, almost half of the 7,000 or so languages currently spoken on earth will be dead.