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Extinction looms for approximately half of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world. "With the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages," warns the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).1
Addressing tfiis crisis proves urgent. Unless something is done, most of the imperiled tongues will die out by the 22nd century, forecasts die concerned linguist Michael Krauss, professor emeritus at University of Alaska Fairbanks.2
Uneasy quiet
North, Centra], and South America especially fall victim to this potential silence since oppressive political regimes have left speakers of native languages in the suppressed minority, for instance, 14 tongues are threatened in Ecuador, including 10 varieties of Quichua, and 39 in Bolivia, including Aymara, Guaraní, and Quechua.3 Because the majority of these waning vernaculars are not the official mode of communication of the given country, do not serve a role in critical areas of daily life such as education or economics, and arc spoken by relatively few (oftentimes less than 1 ,(KX) people), they're particularly susceptible.' In Mexico alone, 143 languages might come to an end, with 32 "severely endangered" (a category UNESCO defines as spoken by grandparents but not used l)y later generations with children), such as Otomi and Sierra Totonac, and 2 1 "critically endangered" (the grandparental generation demonstrating only partial and infrequent use of the variety), such as Tabasco Nahuad and Kaqchikel/
The number at risk in the United States is a whopping 191, calculates UNESCO. Examples include Comanche and Colorado Southern L'tc of the 35 "severely endangered" and Pawnee and Osage of the 74 "critically endangered."6 Some immigrant languages, like Lithuanian, that fade away in America and odicr outposts over the eras still retain viability in their homelands, of course. But as Leanne Hinton, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at University of California, Berkeley; explains in her 2008 book, The Green Book of Language RevOalizadon in Practice, third edition, "[W] hen an indigenous group stops speaking its language, the language disappears from the face of the earth."7
Utter ingenuity
"However, this process is neither inevitable nor irreversible," UNESCO points out, for "wellplanned and implemented language policies can bolster the ongoing ellbrts of speaker communities to...