Oh my. As many as 2,500 languages are in danger of becoming extinct. Given that a person who can speak three or four languages is considered to be multilingual, it’s mind boggling to think that there can be that many individual dialects in the world, let alone that those are simply the ones we may be about to lose. How many are there in total? My brain hurts! According to UNESCO, it’s an unanswerable question –- but if you really push them, they’ll say 6,700.

Sorry. Back to the story: as Lizzy Davies reports in today’s Guardian, UNESCO has just unveiled its database of “endangered tongues”, including 500 that are considered to be in a critical situation. 192 of those originate in India. She gives the example of Livnovian; once a thriving Baltic idiom, now spoken by only one person. The same applies to Wintu-Nomlaki, Yahgan and Kaixna, all of which sound like Klingon words. (Another digression: can a lingo -– I’m scraping at the edges of the thesaurus here –- really be spoken by a single human being? Does talking to yourself count?) This decline is mainly attributable to the increased popularity of cities: people leave their obscure patois at home, learning the mainstream vernacular as quickly as possible in the hope of integration. “Killer languages” such as English or Spanish deserve a large share of the blame; as does cultural shame, a syndrome wherein communities try to forget their heritage.

We may be too late to resurrect Cornish, which was spoken by smugglers in days of yore, but Welsh, Catalan and Basque have all been reclaimed from the doldrums in recent years and there is hope that others may follow. For the moment, the creators of database and the accompanying Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger appear content to list the casualties but surely there will soon be online tutorials in Manx. Why ever not?