Death in languages is an interesting but sad subject for around half of the world’s 6000 languages are endangered. If this was publicised it as much as the plight of endangered animal is publicised then more could be done about it. Because a lot of culture is in the speech and text a lot of culture will go with the languages. This loss of the languages and cultures; this is unnecessary and it would be very sad to lose thousands of languages and cultures.
In 2005, 549 languages had less than 100 speakers including 204 languages with less than 10 speakers.[i]
Foundation for Endangered Languages: http://www.ogmios.org/manifesto/index.htm
Some people prefer to say that the languages is just sleeping and it can be revived however for languages that are not well recorded this is almost impossible. Hebrew was a dead language for 2000 years before it became the language spoken by most of Israel but is was still used for ceremonial purposes and was written down. Also it did not suffer the difficulties that many languages faces of been spoken by a repressed minorities how are under pressure to conform to the majority’s standard. Instead it was able to relieve social pressure on speakers to learn it.
