Language Diversity Index Tracks Global Loss of Mother Tongues (fwd link)

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

Language Diversity Index Tracks Global Loss of Mother Tongues

Posted on March 1, 2011
USA

 "For the past several years, we had been hearing anecdotal reports
about endangered languages--how we're losing languages by the day, how
we may lose 50-90 percent of languages before the end of the century.
But nobody had any reliable quantitative data to corroborate these
claims," says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and director of Terralingua, an
international NGO devoted to sustaining the biocultural diversity of
life through research, education, policy, and on-the-ground work.

"But now a new Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD), the first of its
kind, shows quantitatively, for the first time, what's really
happening with the world's languages," Maffi adds. "The ILD shows in
quantitatively rigorous ways what the trends have been over the past
30 years in the numbers of mother-tongue speakers of the world's
languages--and the news is not good: an overall decline of more than
20 percent in that period alone."

Access full article below:
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2011/03/language-diversity-index-tracks-global-loss-of-mother-tongues.html