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A list of endangered languages (with fewer than 1000 speakers or in rapid decline). In order to judge if a language is endangered, the number of speakers is less important than the age distribution; there may be 500,000 speakers of Breton over 50 years of age, but fewer than 2,000 are under 25 years of age - thus it is highly likely that Breton will die out in the next half-century (a situation mirrored in the U.S., albeit on a smaller scale, among most Native Americans and the Cajuns of southern Louisiana). There are languages in Indonesia reported to be in a similar situation with as many as two million native speakers alive now, but all of advancing age, with practically no transmission to the young. On the other hand, while there are 30,000 Ladin speakers left, almost all children still learn it as their mother tongue, thus Ladin is not endangered in the 21st century. Similarly, the Hawaiian language has only about 1,000 speakers but it has stabilized at this number, and now has school instruction in the language from kindergarten through college. While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a good scenario, about half of today's languages will go extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years. Accordingly, the list below presents only a sample of the approximately 3,000 currently endangered languages.
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