Knowledge Extinction Dashboard

Timeline projection uses speaker counts and decay modeling, available for 154 of 5,318 languages.

Data scope

Showing all endangered languages from Glottolog v5.3, including 5,164 with regional-prior knowledge assignments.

Overview

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Critically Endangered
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High-Value at Risk
~9
Global rate (UNESCO)
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Visible on Map
Domains at Highest Risk (direct evidence only)

Filters

Endangerment Level

“Critically endangered” also contains languages Glottolog classes as extinct. The build maps the AES level extinct into this bucket, so some markers shown here have no remaining speakers. The two cannot be separated in this build: the source cache is not retained, so the number is not establishable — only that it is non-zero and within the 1,448 records shown as critical.

Continent
Knowledge Domain
Observability Score
0
Filter applies only to the 155 direct-evidence languages. Languages with regional-prior knowledge assignments are not affected.
Max Speaker Count
All
Speaker counts available for 154 of 5,318 languages (those with direct ethnographic sourcing). Slider applies only to those.

Domain Breakdown (Critical)

Counted from the 154 records with direct ethnographic evidence, not the full 5,318. The other 5,164 have knowledge domains assigned by a regional rule based on latitude and longitude rather than observed, and those assignments are partitioned by continent by construction — charting them would show the rule, not a finding.

Data source: Glottolog v5.3 (Hammarström H, Forkel R, Haspelmath M, Bank S. 2024. CC-BY-4.0, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.596479) — the sole dataset ingested by this dashboard. Endangerment levels come from Glottolog's AES field, whose levels correspond to the categories used by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger; UNESCO is referenced for that terminology only and is not a data source here. Corrected 2026-08-23: this line previously listed the UNESCO Atlas and Cámara-Leret & Bascompte (2021) as data sources. Neither was ingested — the build reads only cldf/values.csv and cldf/languages.csv.

Glottolog v5.3 (Hammarström et al. 2024), filtered to AES levels vulnerable through critically endangered; the AES extinct level is folded into “critically” and cannot be separated in this build. 5,318 languages displayed. 154 carry traditional-knowledge domains from direct ethnographic sourcing; the other 5,164 carry none. Knowledge domains were previously assigned to those 5,164 by a latitude/longitude rule and shown per record; that display was removed on 2026-08-23 because a geographic rule's output is not an observation about a language community. The domain chart and filter count direct-evidence records only.