[mkl]

Most are at risk of extinction.

"half of the languages spoken today have fewer than 10,000 speakers and that a quarter have fewer than 1,000 speakers" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death).

"Today, on average, we lose one language in the world every six weeks. There are approximately 6800 languages. But four percent of the population speaks 96 percent of the languages, and 96 percent of the population speaks four percent of the languages. These four percent are spoken by large language groups and are therefore not at risk. But 96 percent of the languages we know are more or less at risk. You have to treat them like extinct species." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_preservation).

"Over the past century alone, around 400 languages – about one every three months – have gone extinct, and most linguists estimate that 50% of the world’s remaining 6,500 languages will be gone by the end of this century (some put that figure as high as 90%, however). Today, the top ten languages in the world claim around half of the world’s population." (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140606-why-we-must-save...).

[RheingoldRiver]

Wow, preserving almost-dead languages sounds like something that LLMs would be pretty appropriate for, right? We would primarily need as large a body of written text translated into both a "known" language and the dying language as possible.

[qumpis]

May be a cool piece of tech for historians in 100s of years from now!