Linguistic Diversity: 7,000 Languages and the Risk of Language Loss

Well, the beauty of linguistic diversity is

that it reveals to us,

uh, just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind

is.

Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but

7,000. There's 7,000 languages spoken around the

world.

Uh, and we can create many more. Languages, of course, are

living things, things that we can hone and, uh, change to

suit our needs.

Now, the tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this

linguistic diversity all

the time. So we're losing about one language a week,

and by some

estimates, half of the world's languages will be gone

in the next hundred years.