Editing Lists of endangered languages (section)

==Discussion==
[[SIL Ethnologue]] (2005) lists 473 out of 6,909 living languages inventorised (6.8%) as "nearly extinct", indicating cases where "only a few elderly speakers are still living"; this figure dropped to 6.1% as of 2013.<ref>{{cite book|editor1-last=Lewis|editor1-first=M. Paul|editor2-last=Simons|editor2-first=Gary F.|editor3-last=Fennig|editor3-first=Charles D. Fennig|date= 2013|title= Ethnologue: Languages of the World|edition= Seventeenth |location= Dallas, Texas|publisher= SIL International}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|editor1-last=Lewis|editor1-first=M. Paul|editor2-last=Simons|editor2-first=Gary F.|editor3-last=Fennig|editor3-first=Charles D. Fennig|date= 2013|title= Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Sumnmary by language status)|edition= Online version of Seventeenth  |location= Dallas, Texas|url=http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/status |publisher= SIL International}}</ref>

When judging whether or not a language is endangered, the number of speakers is less important than their age distribution. There are languages in [[Indonesia]] reported with as many as two million native speakers alive now, but all of advancing age, with little or no transmission to the young. On the other hand, while there are only 30,000 [[Ladin language|Ladin]] speakers left, almost all children still learn it as their mother tongue; thus Ladin is not currently endangered. Similarly, the [[Hawaiian language]] has only about 1,000 speakers, but it has stabilised at this number, and there is now school instruction in the language, from preschool through the 12th grade; thus the language is classified as merely vulnerable.

While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a conservative scenario, about half of today's languages will become extinct within the next 50 to 100 years.{{Citation needed|date=July 2019}}