About 3,998 of the world's 6,684 living spoken languages, 60%, are endangered, according to the endangerment ratings in Glottolog 5.3, the language catalogue kept by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (2026 release). Indonesia lists the most endangered languages (568), followed by Papua New Guinea (452), India (251), China (245), Mexico (225) and Nigeria (216). Measured as a share, the crisis is deepest in Glottolog's Australia region, where 127 of 128 surviving Indigenous languages are endangered, and in the Americas, where 89% are. Another 981 spoken languages are already extinct.
Each dot on the map above is one language, placed at the point Glottolog uses for it and coloured by its status. Dots are drawn in random order so no status hides another, and two insets enlarge the most crowded areas, New Guinea and the Nigeria–Cameroon belt. The darkest dots, moribund and nearly extinct languages, gather in the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon and northern Australia.
How many languages are disappearing?
Glottolog's ratings are gathered from other catalogues. Its Agglomerated Endangerment Status (AES) compiles assessments from the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ElCat), UNESCO's atlas, Ethnologue and later sources, and fits each language onto one six-step scale. The steps line up with UNESCO's wording like this: not endangered (UNESCO "safe"), threatened ("vulnerable"), shifting ("definitely endangered"), moribund ("severely endangered"), nearly extinct ("critically endangered") and extinct. We count a language as endangered if it sits on any of the four middle steps.
The counts cover languages only. Glottolog 5.3 has 7,674 spoken first languages, and we leave out its 13,706 dialect entries, its language families, and the entries it keeps in separate categories: sign languages, pidgins, artificial languages, bookkeeping placeholders, and 117 unclassifiable, 61 unattested, 3 mixed languages and 11 speech registers with a rating. Those last four groups include 161 extinct entries, so the extinct total below depends on this choice. 7,665 of the spoken languages carry a status, and the split is:
- Not endangered: 2,686
- Threatened: 1,541
- Shifting: 1,750
- Moribund: 415
- Nearly extinct: 292
- Extinct: 981
That gives 3,998 endangered languages out of 6,684 still spoken, or 59.8%. If you drop the mildest step and count only shifting or worse (UNESCO's "definitely endangered" and beyond), the figure is 2,457, or 37%. Sign languages, counted separately, fare little better: 87 of the 171 living sign languages with a rating are endangered.
Ethnologue's 29th edition (2026) says 3,226 languages are endangered, about 44% of the total. Its lowest endangered level, EGIDS 6b, is the same cut-off as Glottolog's "threatened", so the gap comes from different assessments, not a different definition. The Catalogue of Endangered Languages reported 3,176 endangered languages (46%) and 639 extinct ones at a 2013 conference. UNESCO's 2009 Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger covered about 2,500 languages, 538 of them critically endangered, against 292 that Glottolog now rates nearly extinct. Glottolog's figure is the highest of the three. The totals differ because the catalogues were compiled in different years, from different language inventories, and Glottolog's status combines several sources' judgements rather than relying on one. The broad message does not change: somewhere between two-fifths and three-fifths of the world's languages are at risk.
Which countries have the most endangered languages?
Glottolog lists every country where a language is spoken, so a language shared by two countries counts in both. With that rule, the ranking follows linguistic diversity first and endangerment second. The countries at the top are the ones with the most languages to lose, a list covered in our guide to the countries with the most languages.
| Rank | Country | Endangered | Threatened | Shifting | Moribund | Nearly extinct | Living languages | Share endangered | Extinct |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Indonesia | 568 | 270 | 224 | 60 | 14 | 702 | 81% | 25 |
| 2 | Papua New Guinea | 452 | 103 | 284 | 51 | 14 | 850 | 53% | 19 |
| 3 | India | 251 | 129 | 112 | 5 | 5 | 450 | 56% | 28 |
| 4 | China | 245 | 109 | 94 | 29 | 13 | 378 | 65% | 21 |
| 5 | Mexico | 225 | 127 | 83 | 8 | 7 | 278 | 81% | 26 |
| 6 | Nigeria | 216 | 111 | 84 | 13 | 8 | 522 | 41% | 28 |
| 7 | Brazil | 163 | 30 | 98 | 13 | 22 | 172 | 95% | 97 |
| 8 | Australia | 134 | 7 | 39 | 40 | 48 | 139 | 96% | 227 |
| 9 | United States | 131 | 11 | 49 | 34 | 37 | 147 | 89% | 137 |
| 10 | Cameroon | 117 | 66 | 40 | 7 | 4 | 293 | 40% | 13 |
| 11 | Russia | 117 | 36 | 45 | 23 | 13 | 141 | 83% | 21 |
| 12 | Malaysia | 99 | 60 | 31 | 7 | 1 | 122 | 81% | 3 |
| 13 | Nepal | 89 | 29 | 50 | 5 | 5 | 112 | 79% | 2 |
| 14 | Vanuatu | 87 | 9 | 60 | 6 | 12 | 115 | 76% | 4 |
| 15 | Colombia | 81 | 27 | 42 | 2 | 10 | 85 | 95% | 23 |
Indonesia leads with 568 endangered languages out of 702 still spoken there, 81%. Glottolog places 727 spoken languages in Indonesia, living and extinct, close to the 718 regional languages that Indonesia's education ministry had mapped by 2019. Indonesia's own vitality survey had by then assessed only 74 of them, finding 22 endangered, 4 critical and 11 extinct, so national figures cannot yet confirm or contradict the larger total. 351 of the 568 lie east of 125°E, mostly in Maluku and Indonesian New Guinea; how they sit alongside the national language is covered in our guide to the languages spoken in Indonesia.
Papua New Guinea is second with 452 of 850, a lower share (53%) because 398 of its languages are still rated not endangered. Ethnologue's country page agrees on the size of the inventory, 840 living indigenous languages, but rates only 314 as endangered. That gap of more than a hundred languages is the clearest example of how much depends on whose assessment a catalogue trusts.
India (251 of 450) and China (245 of 378) follow. Glottolog lists all 23 languages whose point lies on Taiwan under China (11 of them under China alone). We count them under Taiwan instead, where 15 of 19 living languages are endangered and 7 are extinct. On Glottolog's own codes China would list 260 endangered languages and rank third, ahead of India. Mexico (225, 81% of its languages) matches Indonesia's share, while Nigeria (216 of 522) and Cameroon (117 of 293) show the African pattern: many languages, most of them still rated not endangered.
Where is the share highest?
Ranking by count hides the places where almost nothing is left. Glottolog groups languages into six macroareas, and the chart below shows each one's living languages as a single 100% bar. The 7 languages Glottolog places in two macroareas are counted in each.
Australia is the extreme. Of the 128 languages still spoken in the Australia macroarea, 127 are endangered; the only one rated not endangered is Kriol. Another 227 are extinct, more than in any other macroarea. By country, Australia has the highest share of any country with at least 50 living languages (96%) and the most languages that are moribund or nearly extinct (88).
Australia's own survey is more hopeful. The fourth National Indigenous Languages Survey found 177 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages being spoken or used in 2025-26, 45 of them "strong". Its count includes languages being revived, and its test for "strong" changed with this round, so it is not directly comparable with Glottolog's ratings, which rest largely on older assessments. More detail on how those languages sit beside English is in our article on the languages of Australia.
The Americas come next: 92% of South America's 372 living languages and 87% of North America's 478 are endangered. Brazil (95%), Colombia (95%), Canada (95%) and the United States (89%) all sit near the top of the share table. Eurasia and Papunesia, the Glottolog name for Indonesia, New Guinea, the Philippines, Taiwan and the Pacific islands, are both just under two-thirds. Africa is the exception. Only 38% of its 2,117 languages are endangered and 1,302 are rated not endangered; Côte d’Ivoire, at 19% of 104 living languages, has the lowest share of any country with at least 100.
Where have languages already gone silent?
The extinct column shows where the loss is furthest along. Australia lists 227 extinct languages, the United States 137 and Brazil 97. In Australia and the United States, extinct languages now outnumber the endangered ones still spoken.
Much of what disappeared was barely recorded. Of the 981 extinct languages, 336 (34%) are known from a word list or less, according to Glottolog's record of the most extensive description of each language. The languages now nearly extinct are better covered: 136 of 292 (47%) have a published grammar, which gives later generations something to learn from after the last native speaker has died.
What is driving it?
A language becomes endangered when parents stop passing it on. Ethnologue's definition puts it in exactly those terms: endangerment starts when a community begins handing a more dominant language to its children instead. The question is why families make that switch.
The broadest global study so far, by Bromham and colleagues in Nature Ecology & Evolution (2021), tested 51 possible factors across 6,511 spoken languages, using an earlier Glottolog release. Two stood out. Languages in places with denser road networks were more endangered, which the authors link to people moving between villages and towns. So were languages in places with more years of schooling, which they read as a sign that education in a single national language pushes local ones aside. Contact with neighbouring languages was not a cause in itself: languages in contact with many other Indigenous languages tended to be safer.
The same study found the highest shares of endangered languages in Australia, North America, parts of South America, northern China and Siberia, and the largest numbers in New Guinea, Central America and the Himalayas, the same pattern the map shows. Its projection is the starkest number in the field: without intervention, language loss could triple within 40 years, at least one language a month, and over 1,500 languages could be lost by the end of the century.
How the count was made
All numbers come from the Glottolog 5.3 CLDF release (March 2026): the language table for names, coordinates, macroareas and countries, and the values table for each language's endangerment status, category and description level. "Country" means every country Glottolog lists for a language; 726 endangered languages are listed in more than one. 2 languages have no coordinates and are missing from the map but included in the counts, and 9 spoken languages with no status at all are left out.
You can download the data as a CSV for all 244 countries and territories, with each one's languages at every status and its share endangered. To compare your own set of countries, say the Amazon basin states side by side, Parity turns a status-by-country file like this into stacked bars without any code. Sources:
- Glottolog 5.3 (Hammarström, Forkel, Haspelmath & Bank, 2026), CLDF release: languages.csv and values.csv: Agglomerated Endangerment Status, coordinates, macroareas and country codes; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; CC BY 4.0 (as stated on glottolog.org and in the repository's LICENSE)
- Glottolog: Agglomerated Endangerment Status, definitions
- Ethnologue (29th edition, 2026): How many languages are endangered? (archived 4 Oct 2026)
- Ethnologue: Papua New Guinea country page (archived 13 Nov 2025)
- Campbell et al., New Knowledge: Findings from the Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat), 2013
- UN News, UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (19 Feb 2009)
- Productivity Commission, Closing the Gap Outcome Area 16 (NILS4, 2025-26)
- Bromham et al., Global predictors of language endangerment, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2021)
- Natural Earth country outlines (via world-atlas): public domain
Glottolog's extinct column only says that a language is gone, not when, so the history of individual losses, from Manx to Eyak, is a separate story, told in our look at dead languages and why they die.