The word extinct might bring to mind dinosaurs and dodo birds or sabretooth cats and wooly mammoths, but animals aren't the only natural thing at high risk of extinction in the wild. Languages are too.
It's estimated that of the approximately 7,000 languages worldwide, 90% are spoken by less than 100,000 people, and some have as few as a single speaker remaining.
Language death occurs when the last remaining native speaker of a language passes away.
But how does it get to the point where a language's continued existence is reliant on a single person? How do languages die or go extinct?
Let's investigate why this happens and why you should care about it. I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords." First things first. Languages that have speakers who learn the language as their native tongue are known as living languages or modern languages.
I'm speaking in one right now, English. And maybe you know one of the thousands of other languages alive and well in the 21st century.
On the opposite end of the spectrum of linguistic life, well, it's a little more moribund.
However, it's not as stark as the difference between life and death.
Like endangered species, languages have stages of dying that may or may not be reversible.
A dead language is one that despite no native speakers, does have second language speakers or is used in written form.
