包括厄瓜多爾、哥倫比亞、秘魯、巴西和玻利維亞在內的中南美洲地區，有一百一十三種語言瀕臨消失。使用者極少、社會上較不重視的印第安語言，被西班牙語、葡萄牙語和較強勢的印第安語言取代。
包括加拿大卑詩省、美國華盛頓州及俄勒岡州的北美太平洋沿岸高原，有五十四種語言瀕臨消失。在此地區的美國部分，會說瀕臨消失語言的最年輕者超過六十歲，其中Siletz Deeni只有一人會說，這是俄勒岡州Siletz印第安保留區原本通行之廿七種語言的最後一種。
美國奧克拉荷馬州、德州和新墨西哥州，共有四十種語言瀕臨危險。奧克拉荷馬是全美印第安語言種類最密集的州之一，該州奄奄一息的語言是Yuchi，可能與全球其他任何語言都沒有關聯。到二○○五年為止，Yuchi部落只有五名老人能以該語言流暢溝通。
語言學家指出，失去語言意味失去人類思想的累積，目前多達半數語言沒有書寫紀錄，也就是說，假如最後一個會說某種語言的人去世，該語言就隨著此人消失，因 為沒有任何字典、文學或文字記錄這種語言。要使一種語言復活的關鍵，是設法讓新一代會說該語言。全球八成人口說目前通行最廣的八十三種語言，另有三千五百 種語言只有百分之零點二的人口會說，弱勢語言面臨的危險，甚至比動植物瀕臨絕種更加嚴重。
Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.
Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.
New research, reported yesterday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.
The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic and at languagehotspots.org.
In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.
Beginning what is expected to be a long-term project to identify and record endangered languages, Dr. Harrison has traveled to many parts of the world with Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute, in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic Society.
The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families.
In Australia, where nearly all the 231 spoken tongues are endangered, the researchers came upon three known speakers of Magati Ke in the Northern Territory, and three Yawuru speakers in Western Australia. In July, Dr. Anderson said, they met the sole speaker of Amurdag, a language in the Northern Territory that had been declared extinct.
“This is probably one language that cannot be brought back, but at least we made a record of it,” Dr. Anderson said, noting that the Aborigine who spoke it strained to recall words he had heard from his father, now dead.
Many of the 113 languages in the region from the Andes Mountains into the Amazon basin are poorly known and are giving way to Spanish or Portuguese, or in a few cases, a more dominant indigenous language. In this area, for example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have a secret tongue mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science.
“How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being spoken by very few, is a mystery,” Dr. Harrison said in a news release.
The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages in the Northwest Pacific plateau, a region including British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Only one person remains who knows Siletz Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.
In eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages, like Russian or Sakha.
Forty languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of them originally used by Indian tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.
Another measure of the threat to many relatively unknown languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that 83 languages with “global” influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants.
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