address: http://www.youthxchange.net/main/b253-languages-c.asp title: ENDANGERED LANGUAGES & BIODIVERSITY

Over 50% of the world’s languages are endangered: 1 language disappears on average every 2 weeks… 96% are spoken by 4% of the world’s population; 52% are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people; 28% by fewer than 1,000; 80% of African languages have no orthography. It has been demonstrated that where you are losing cultural diversity, you are losing biodiversity, and vice versa: there is a remarkable overlap between the global mappings of world's areas of biological ‘megadiversity’ and areas of high cultural and linguistic diversity; of the 9 countries that together account for 60% of human languages, 6 of these centers of cultural diversity are also countries with exceptional numbers of unique plants and animal species.