Almost half of world's languages under threat of disappearing

More than 7,000 languages are spoken across the globe today, yet at least 3,000 of them — roughly 40% — are considered endangered. A language is classified as endangered when communities begin transmitting a more dominant language to their children instead, while the original tongue survives mainly as a secondary language.

As February 21 is observed as International Mother Language Day, an article by Al Jazeera gathered statistics from the Ethnologue database of the world’s languages, which offers a revealing snapshot of the current global linguistic landscape.

English remains the most widely spoken language worldwide, with about 1.5 billion speakers spread across 186 countries. Only around two in 10 English speakers are native speakers, while the remaining 80% use it as a second, third or additional language.

Mandarin Chinese ranks second overall, with nearly 1.2 billion speakers. However, when counting native speakers alone, it is the largest language in the world, largely due to China’s population size.

Hindi is third, with 609 million speakers, followed by Spanish at 559 million and Standard Arabic with 335 million speakers.

Out of the 7,159 languages spoken globally, 3,193 — or 44% — are endangered, while 3,479 (49%) are considered stable, and 487 (7%) are institutional languages, meaning they are used in government, education and media.

Ethnologue also reports that 337 languages are classified as dormant and 454 as extinct. Dormant languages no longer have fluent speakers but continue to hold social or cultural significance within an ethnic community. Extinct languages, by contrast, have no remaining speakers and no active social function or community claiming them as part of their heritage.

Around 88.1 million people speak an endangered language as their mother tongue. Among these languages:

1,431 have fewer than 1,000 first-language speakers

463 have fewer than 100 speakers

110 have fewer than 10 speakers

Just 25 countries account for roughly 80% of the world’s endangered languages. Oceania has the highest concentration, followed by Asia, Africa and the Americas.

There are 293 known writing systems, or scripts — sets of graphic symbols used to represent languages. Of these, more than 156 are still in use, while over 137 historical scripts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and Aztec pictograms, have fallen out of use.

The Latin script — used for languages such as English, French, Spanish and German — is employed in at least 305 of the world’s 7,139 known living languages. More than 70% of the global population uses it.

By Nazrin Sadigova