The State of the 7,168 Living Languages: 14% are dying

What is the benefit of keeping a language alive, other than to not lose the knowledge/creativity from books written in the language? If those books are translated into a more widely-used language that isn't dying, would that make it okay for the language to die? Is it purely out of respect for the culture of the language? The only other thing I can think of is that the folks that use the dying language don't know any other languages - which I can understand (no pun intended).

Small languages are dying because it&#x27;s not economically viable for their communities to keep speaking them. But many large languages are also degrading, because of similar reasons.<p>Computing technology has a big part to play in this. It&#x27;s still a huge pain to use RTL languages in many places. Bidi text is even worse. Keyboards, character sets and what not are still not standardized.

That&#x27;s just a side-effect less isolated communities.<p>As more and more people from within different communities interact, the value of a common language increases and the value of the isolated language decreases.<p>The eventual equilibrium is going to be maybe 3 languages left, with each individual in the world able to speak at least 2 of them.<p>Any effort expended on keeping languages alive is pointless.

Things die, new things are born, things die, new things are born. It’s the circle of life. It’s natural and ok for things to die.

Over 90% of the &quot;7,168&quot; languages they mention are slightly different dialects of common languages.<p>Arabic probably makes up 1&#x2F;3 of those &quot;7,168&quot; languages.<p>I think the claim that there are &quot;7,168&quot; languages is a result of publish-or-perish.