Why preserving indigenous and African languages matters
A language does not disappear all at once. It goes quiet one speaker at a time, and the window to record it is about one generation wide. This is what that looks like in numbers — and what we are doing about it.
- of the world's roughly 6,700 languages are in danger of disappearing
- 40%of the world's roughly 6,700 languages are in danger of disappearingUNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
- languages have died out in the last three generations
- 200+languages have died out in the last three generationsUNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
- languages have fewer than 10 remaining speakers
- ~200languages have fewer than 10 remaining speakersUNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
- languages in Africa are classed as threatened
- 428languages in Africa are classed as threatenedUNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
Roughly two and a half thousand languages are already in trouble
UNESCO grades endangerment by how transmission has broken down — not by how many speakers remain. Once children stop learning a language at home, the clock starts.
2,279 languages are currently classed as endangered, across four levels of severity. Hover or focus a level to read what it means.
Critically endangered
The youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently.
Counts are languages listed in the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Languages already extinct are not shown as a bar — the Atlas reports “more than 200” lost in the last three generations, and a floor should not be drawn as a count.
Africa in focus
Africa holds roughly a third of the world's languages — estimates of the continent's total range from about 1,500 to 3,000. UNESCO classes 428 of them as threatened, and warns that up to a tenth of Africa's languages could vanish within a century.
The pressure is structural, not accidental. Urbanisation, migration and education systems built around colonial languages have broken transmission: parents who speak an indigenous language raise children who understand it but do not speak it, and those children raise children who do neither.
These are also precisely the languages no commercial actor will ever prioritise. There is no market in a language with twenty thousand speakers.
What goes when a language goes
A language is not a list of words. It is a way of seeing, and every one that disappears takes a way of seeing with it.
Knowledge with nowhere else to live
Medicinal plants, farming calendars, fishing grounds, weather signs, genealogy, law. Much of it was never written down in any language, and all of it is encoded in the vocabulary of the people who hold it.
A community's link to its own past
When the last fluent speakers go, their grandchildren lose direct access to the songs, proverbs and family history that were carried in that language — not translated, but gone.
A way of describing the world
Languages divide up colour, time, kinship, space and obligation differently. Each one is a working hypothesis about how experience can be organised, tested over centuries.
The evidence itself
Undocumented languages leave no record for linguists, historians or the communities themselves. Nothing can be revived from a language nobody recorded.
What we have recorded so far
We are not describing a problem and leaving it there. This is where the documentation stands today, against where it needs to get to.
Language entries recorded and verified
90,000+
Every entry is reviewed by a native speaker before it is published. The goal is a million.
Languages documented
44
Across all five African regions and 44 countries. Phase 3 scales toward 100 and beyond, prioritising the languages closest to being lost.
How the work actually happens
Regional coordinators travel into communities where a language is still in daily use and work through local elders, teachers, associations and radio stations. Elders are the priority: in fragile languages they are frequently the last speakers with full command of vocabulary, idiom and register. Every recording is transcribed, translated and reviewed by native speakers before it is published — openly, and free to use.
Read the full method and roadmapThere is a second clock running
Even languages with millions of speakers are disappearing from the systems that now organise education, commerce and public life. African languages are almost entirely absent from the data that AI is built on — which decides who gets to use it.
African languages and AIEvery donation records a voice that would otherwise be lost
Sources
- UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger — UNESCO, Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (3rd edition, 2010).
Figures are reproduced from these published sources and are not estimates of our own. Where a source gives a range or a floor rather than a single number, we say so rather than picking a figure.