According to the UN's cultural agency UNESCO, of the 6,900 languages spoken in the world, some 2,500 are endangered. We've already lost Manx in the Isle of Man, Ubykh in Turkey and last year Alaska's last native speaker of Eyak, Marie Smith Jones, died.
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use, generally because it has few surviving speakers. If it loses all of its native speakers, it becomes an extinct language. Seemingly there are 199 languages in the world that are spoken by fewer than a dozen people, including Karaim which has six speakers in Ukraine and Wichita, spoken by 10 people in the US state of Oklahoma.
While there is no definite threshold for identifying a language as endangered, three main criteria are used as guidelines:
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.
Is it important to preserve these languages, or is it just a natural progression that they die out? I'm not sure, but I am certain of one thing, I wish we could get rid of Gobbledygook.