Problems associated with language endangerment:

The speakers of an endangered language and linguists (or revitalization workers) might have different views on the revitalization and/or language itself. For instance, for a language community it might be enough to know some of the language (eg. using traditional names for places), whereas linguists want to revitalize "the whole language". Thus, there may be contradicting views on the goals of revitalization which can create challenges in cooperation. In addition, speakers of a language community might have varying opinions and views on language and language revitalization within the community, making it more difficult to determine the goals and purposes of revitalization.

There are multiple factors related to language vitality and endangerment, with the total number of speakers being only one of them. Thus, several different tools and classification systems for measuring language vitality have been produced.

In general it would be important to pay attention how we linguists talk about endangered languages - for instance determining a language death by using this word might be harmful, and language speakers might see the "status" and endangerment differently than linguists. This is for example a case of Livonian. On one hand, you can find information that the last native speaker of Livonian, Grizelda Kristiņa, died in 2013, on the other hand, there is a record of the one and only living native speaker, Kuldi Medne, a two-year old girl brought up in Livonian and Latvian. What does it mean? Does Livonian remain an extinct language or does something change when there officially is a native speaker, though very young of age?

We also often talk about language endangerment, although what is endangered is much more than just language, it is the culture and knowledge that are lost too (for instance the kinship terms in some Australian communities).

Language counting - How many do we have and how many will we have in 2050?

If we want to measure the quantity of world languages, we encounter the inherent problem of what it actually means to count languages. This question is associated with the issue of determining whether a language can be considered a language or if it should be called a dialect of already acknowledge language. Usually, this question is answered with the data from the largest linguistic database, Ethnologue, which is subtitled by An encyclopaedic reference work cataloguing all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages. Here it is necessary to take into account that even though it is probably the largest and most universal source, not all information is regularly updated. This also means, that the data may be incomplete and in the future significantly influence even currently ongoing research.

Language vitality and endangerment

As in the previous paragraphs, this category is also associated with a lot of issues. It does not mean that there is no universal agreement of what the language vitality and endangerment mean, it is rather than there are more possible explanations and approaches. However, there is one approach which is more or less universally acknowledged.

Three main criteria are used as guidelines for considering a language ‘endangered’:

1. The number of speakers currently living.
2. The mean age of native and/or fluent speakers.
3. The percentage of the youngest generation acquiring fluency with the language in question.

The five levels of language endangerment

UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger categorises 2,500 languages in five levels of endangerment:

1. vulnerable
2. definitely endangered
3. severely endangered
4. critically endangered
5. extinct

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