Languages in Danger: Why Should We Care?

Although there are somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists estimate that anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of those languages will be lost over the course of the century. If this trend continues scholars predict that soon the overwhelming majority of the world's populations will speak only one of a very small number of languages. So what? This talk explores what we lose when a language is lost, who cares, and why.