Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee (SOCHUM)

languages is equally as problematic for the issue of
language endangerment. Over one-quarter of the
world’s languages have fewer than one thousand
speakers, and just over half have fewer than ten
thousand speakers, a level that puts them at an
increased risk for extinction. 46 Crystal’s analysis of
the Ethnologue finds over fifty languages with just
one speaker, which, since language is by definition a
communicative tool between people, are effectively
dead already. In combination, the prevalence of
dominant languages and the small number of
indigenous languages explain the magnitude of the
problem of language endangerment today.
Another way to look at the competition between
dominant and indigenous languages is to investigate
which languages receive official recognition from
states, as the lack of official recognition is a leading
cause of language endangerment. Given the number
of states and the number of languages, each state
would need to recognize an average of thirty-two
unique languages in order for all of the languages
of the word to receive official status somewhere.
The actual figures, however, fall well below this. The
majority of states worldwide are unilingual, and no
state comes close to this thirty-two-language mark;
the countries with the most official languages are
India, with twenty-two, and South Africa with eleven.
Compounding the problem is that the dominant
international languages are officially recognized in
multiple states, increasing the number of indigenous
languages without any recognition even further.
English, for example, has official status in fortyfive
countries, French in thirty, and Spanish and
Arabic both in twenty; overall, these dominant
languages have recognition in well over one hundred
countries. 47 Looking beyond official recognition, one
scholar found that English alone was a “significant”
language, meaning either official or prominent for
business, in about one hundred countries. 48
Instead of looking at the distinction between
dominant and indigenous languages, we can examine
the number of languages spoken on each continent
and the percentage of those that are endangered.
Such an analysis will allow us to determine on which
regions the international community should focus its
efforts when fighting language endangerment. The
regions with the fewest languages are europe and
the Middle East. Only 275 of the world’s languages
(about 4%) have native speakers in Europe and
the Middle east. 49 Most of the languages in these
regions are relatively stable because of the history of
powerful centralized governments, nation-states, and
international trade, which have already weakened or
eliminated a significant number of local languages,
but there are still some endangered languages in the
area.
Approximately one thousand of the world’s
languages (15%) are spoken in the Americas, with more
than three-quarters of those concentrated in Latin
America. 50 the situations for endangered languages
are significantly different between North America and
Latin America. In North America, only two indigenous
languages are considered to be completely safe
from endangerment over the next hundred years,
Greenlandic inuit and eastern Canadian inuit, largely
because these populations have remained isolated
from the centers of political power. About 86% of the
indigenous languages of North America are moribund,
meaning that they are no longer spoken by the
youngest generations. Most of these languages will
become extinct in the subsequent century, including
two-thirds of the indigenous languages of Canada in
the next fifty years. 51 In Latin America, the situation is
less bleak, with only 17% of Central American and 27%
of South American languages considered moribund. 52
That said, there are still some instances of severe
language loss in Latin America. Brazil, for example,
still has over two hundred languages, but this figure
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