Native tongues have long gone extinct

Reversing deadspeak: Linguists supported by the National Science Foundation are meeting at the University of Utah next week hoping to lay the groundwork for an international online catalogue of endangered and dying languages.

Native tongues have long gone extinct -- perhaps half of all existing languages in the last 500 years. But experts say the march of civilization and globalization -- and, yes, communication systems -- puts nearly 90 percent of the world's roughly 7,000 languages at risk. Information on how people talk around the world isn't just academic -- languages carry knowledge important to medicine, botany, geography, even genetics.

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