15
May 2003
Language extinction risk: Mind your language
There is sufficient worldwide concern about the disappearance of human languages for UNESCO to declare 21 February International Mother Language Day. Next year's will be the fifth. But there is little consensus on how many languages are under threat, or even of what constitutes a threatened language. In this issue William Sutherland adopts a novel approach to quantifying the risks of languages disappearing, by applying the internationally recognized criteria for classifying animal and plant species threatened by extinction. The areas with high language diversity coincide with high mammal and bird diversity, but languages are disappearing at rates even faster than those at which we are losing biological diversity.
Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of
languages and species
WILLIAM J. SUTHERLAND
Nature 423, 276–279 (2003); doi:10.1038/nature01607
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