Languages of the World
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Map

Endangered languages in the atlas

Endangerment according to Glottolog (Agglomerated Endangerment Status, AES) – a single scale compiled from the assessments of endangered-language catalogues. The atlas is a selection, so the world has many more endangered languages: of the 8,672 languages assessed in Glottolog, about 4,400 are rated from “threatened” to “nearly extinct” and about 1,350 as “extinct”.

  • Threatened 66
  • Shifting 29
  • Moribund 4
  • Nearly extinct 2
  • Extinct 7

Country colour – the most endangered language of the atlas spoken there.

Extinct 7

Nearly extinct 2

Moribund 4

Shifting 29

Threatened 66

Not assessed by Glottolog: 40. Not endangered: 319. Extinct according to Glottolog means without native speakers – languages such as Latin or Sanskrit live on in scholarship, liturgy or as second languages.

Source and licence

Endangerment levels come from Glottolog 5.3 (CLDF release, “aes” parameter, CC BY 4.0 – Hammarström, Forkel, Haspelmath, Bank). We do not use the UNESCO Atlas of languages or the Endangered Languages Project catalogue directly – their terms give no clear permission for use on a site with paid plans; Glottolog takes these assessments into account in its AES and publishes the result under an open licence. Glottolog gives a language the worst assessment of any of its varieties; when the assessment concerns only a variety (such as Burgenland Croatian, Algherese Catalan or the Polesian dialects of Ukrainian), the atlas does not show it.