Why do languages die?

There are more than 7,000 languages. The number of people speaking English, Spanish and Mandarin continues to grow, but every fortnight a langauge will disappear forever. The Economist’s language expert Lane Greene explains why. Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: Irankarapte iishu Dydh Da I don’t speak those languages. In fact very few people do. They’re used only by a handful of people, and all those languages are in danger of extinction. There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today but about 1/3 of those have fewer than 1000 speakers and according to UNESCO more than 40% of those languages are in danger of extinction. In fact every fortnight one of the world’s languages disappears forever. When you say dead language many people think of Latin, but Latin actually never died it’s been spoken continuously since the time of the Caesars, but it changed very gradually over 2,000 years until it became Fre