Languages become endangered when parents teach a more dominant language to their children. This clickable map can be found on Ethnologue, a language reference guide and a good place to spend part of this International Decade of Indigenous Languages.
Hover over a language to see the name,
and click for more information,
including a language profile page.
This map can be a bit overwhelming with dots for over 3,000 languages. Here an overall one showing the percent of indigenous languages that are endangered.
The "western world" (plus Australia, New Zealand and Japan) is where these languages are the most endangered. Interestingly many western European countries are in the low zone, though the number of indigenous languages in these countries are pretty low to begin with. It is likely that many languages in this region are already extinct.
Finally if 3,000+ points is not enough for you here is a map of 7,168 living languages from the same site.
There will be more on this subject next week - stay tuned!
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