There are more than 7,000 languages. The number of people speaking English, Spanish and Mandarin continues to grow, but every fortnight a language will disappear forever. The Economist's language expert Lane Greene explains why.
There are more than 7,000 languages in the world.
A third of those have fewer than 1000 speakers. Forty per cent of those are considered endangered.
Languages “die” when communities replace one language with another and parents stop raising their kids to speak the old one.
Teenagers growing up in the Soviet Union dropped other languages spoken at home so they could focus on Russian, as they thought speaking Russian would result in better life outcomes for them.
Speakers of Cantonese and Shanghainese in China feel similarly about Mandarin.
Once a language dies it rarely gets revived. Only one has fully come back from the dead.
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