Linguistics, or the investigation of patterns within and across languages, has yielded findings that not only shed light on the details, but on other areas such as auditory/visual perception and cognition in general. These findings increase exponentially with the number of languages that are documented and allowed to thrive and develop into new language states.

Even if the languages we’ve lost had no surprising qualities, having continued access to speakers who can participate in studies and experiments is an invaluable resource. For example, despite being the most studied living language, English is still the subject of myriad experiments that continue to add to our knowledge about the language.

which languages are most critically endangered? Why don't we just figure it out and do something about it? Unfortunately it’s not that simple, for a few reasons. Nobody knows which languages are truly the most endangered; many of the most imperiled tongues are precisely the ones we know very little about. To label a language as endangered, we must first figure out what counts as a discrete language. Many of you reading this piece speak in a considerably different way than your grandparents; would you be justified to say that their version of English is an endangered language variety? Probably not. There is also not one single parameter that encompasses “endangered-ness.” Even Ethnologue (the Wikipedia for linguists) defines endangered-ness in two dimensions: the number of remaining native speakers, and the EGIDS level (a qualitative measure of how transmission of a language between generations has been disrupted by social or political factors).

Keeping that in mind, let’s look at some examples of endangered languages and the different circumstances that put them at risk. To start is an example of a language with no tie to the linguistic community: not only does it lack the resources offered to documented endangered languages, but we actually don’t know whether there are still speakers or not.