[...]

India is a densely polyglot country. Estimates of the number of languages spoken there vary widely, depending on where one draws the line between language and dialect. But a conservative reckoning would put the number of native Indian tongues at roughly 400; of these, about 350 are rapidly losing speakers. The same is true for thousands of other languages all over the world. And most of these fading tongues don't come anywhere near Kutchi in terms of the number of speakers: of the world's 6,800 extant languages, nearly half are now spoken by fewer than 2,500 people. At the current rate of decline, experts estimate that by the end of this century, at least half of the world's languages will have disappeared-a linguistic extinction rate that works out to one language death, on average, every two weeks. And that's the low-end estimate; some experts predict that the losses could run as high as 90 percent. Michael Krauss, a linguist at the Alaskan Native Language Center and an authority on global language loss, estimates that just 600 of the world's languages are "safe" from extinction, meaning they are still being learned by children.

[...]

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/500

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