Language endangerment (endangered language) occurs when a language is at risk of falling out of use as its speakers die out or shift (language shift) to speaking another language.
Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers, and becomes a ''dead language''. If eventually no one speaks the language at all, it becomes an ''extinct language''.
While languages have always gone extinct throughout human history, they have been disappearing at an accelerated rate in the 20th and 21st centuries due to the processes of globalization and neo-colonialism, where the economically powerful languages dominate other languages.
Together, the eight countries in red contain more than 50% of the world's languages. The areas in blue are the most linguistically diverse in the world, and the locations of most of the world's endangered languages.
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The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations.
The total number of languages in the world is not known. Estimates vary depending on many factors. The consensus is that there are between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, and that between 50–90% of those will have become extinct by the year 2100.
The top 20 languages (List of languages by number of native speakers), those spoken by more than 50 million speakers each, are spoken by 50% of the world's population, whereas many of the other languages are spoken by small communities, most of them with less than 10,000 speakers.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (UNESCO) operates with five levels of language endangerment: "safe", "vulnerable" (not spoken by children outside the home), "definitely endangered" (not spoken by children), "severely endangered" (only spoken by the oldest generations), and "critically endangered" (spoken by few members of the oldest generation, often semi-speakers (Speaker types)).
Notwithstanding claims that the world would be better off if most adopted a single common ''lingua franca'', such as English or Esperanto, there is a consensus that the loss of languages harms the cultural diversity of the world.
It is a common belief, going back to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel in the Old Testament, that linguistic diversity causes political conflict, but this is contradicted by the fact that many of the world's major episodes of violence have taken place in situations with low linguistic diversity, such as the Yugoslav Wars and American Civil War, or the genocide of Rwanda, whereas many of the most stable political units have been highly multilingual.
Many projects aim to prevent or slow this loss by revitalizing (language revitalization) endangered languages and promoting education and literacy in minority languages. Across the world, many countries have enacted Language policy to protect and stabilise the language of indigenous speech community.
A minority of linguists have argued that language loss is a natural process that should not be counteracted, and that documenting endangered languages for posterity is sufficient.