1193: Degrees of Linguistic Endangerment Mar 16, 2018

Pirahã is not considered endangered necessarily—to be precise, it is merely considered vulnerable—even with only a few hundred speakers (approximately 250 and 390). Lombard, on the other hand has 3,500,000 speakers and is considered "definitely endangered". To reconcile this, it must be noted that 'endangered' is more complicated than the number of speakers. There are several factors than go into this categorisation, including how much the language is taught to children in school, how much the language is used officially, and how much the language is used in the home, along with how much other languages are spoken along side it in those same places. Also, for a language not spoken in urban areas, or at least for a language not used much for business, if members of the community urbanize there is a good chance that the rate of language-use will decrease. Insular communities therefore are less likely to see as high a risk of extinction as another language spoken by a more open community, even of the same or larger population. Finally, if the language is only spoken by older people, it will likely not survive long past that generation; a language spoken by 50,000 people only in their teens and twenties is theoretically less seriously endangered than one spoken by 5,000,000 people only over 65.
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