UNESCO has warned that many invaluable human cultural heritages may disappear from the earth as hundreds of human languages are getting extinct.
A UNESCO atlas has indicated the latest information about the general status of languages. It states that more that 200 languages have recently become extinct. Some of the languages that have recently become extinct include Manx from the Isle of Man, Aasax from Tanzania and Eyak from Alaska.
The UNESCO atlas also shows India, the United States, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil as the countries with greater linguistic diversity but with the highest number of endangered languages. This indicates that large democracies really need to be careful about their languages.
As an interesting piece of news, the atlas shows that Papua New Guinea, with more than 800 languages, has the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. The country has comparatively a far fewer languages currently endangered compared to those of other nations.
UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura states that the extinction of a language leads to the disappearance of invaluable cultural heritage itself.
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