About half the world's known languages have died out in the last 500 years (Nettle & Romaine 2000), and specialists argue that from fifty to ninety percent of the world's remaining 6,000 languages will die out by the end of this century (Krauss 1992). Of an estimated 300 languages spoken in the area of present-day U.S. when Columbus arrived in the New World, only 175 are still spoken today; and most of those still spoken are only a generation away from extinction, since they are not being learned by children (Nettle and Romaine 2000).
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