Languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. “According to new measurements, human languages face a greater threat of extinction than birds or mammals. Previously, the life of a language was measured rather arbitrarily by counting the people speaking it. But William Sutherland, a British ecologist, applied the standards of species classification to the 6,809 living tongues in the world to demonstrate what probably comes as little surprise to linguists: There are more extinct languages than species and more languages on the brink of vanishing.”