Endangered Languages Map Screensaver

UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger grew out of an effort in the 1990s to document threatened languages, and an online edition launched in 2009 alongside the third print edition of 2010. It compiles information about languages at risk of falling out of use, grading how vulnerable each is and recording where it is spoken and roughly how many speakers it has.

Vitality is graded on a scale, which the display uses to colour or filter the points. The levels run from vulnerable, where children speak the language but perhaps only at home, through definitely endangered, where children no longer learn it, and severely endangered, where only older generations speak it, to critically endangered, where the youngest speakers are grandparents or older. Extinct languages are recorded as well, but the map concentrates on those still spoken. The grading rests mainly on intergenerational transmission, the first of nine factors in UNESCO’s 2003 vitality framework, alongside speaker numbers, domains of use and available documentation.

The data have limits. Speaker numbers are estimates and often old, because many of these languages have never been counted carefully. A point marks an approximate location, while the language may be spoken across a wide or scattered area. A language can also have several dialects and names, so entries may overlap or be split differently in other catalogues. The map is a snapshot of the atlas, not live monitoring.