Interactive Reading

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The world's languages are vanishing faster than ever. Linguists estimate that one language stops being spoken roughly every two weeks, and that nearly half of the languages alive today may disappear within a century. The reasons are rarely sudden. Instead, families gradually shift to a dominant national language for schooling and work, and children grow up understanding their grandparents' speech without speaking it themselves. Once a language has no young speakers, its survival depends entirely on recordings and written notes. Some communities now run weekend classes and produce smartphone apps to pass on vocabulary, hoping to reverse a decline that took generations to build.