According to the statistics shared by UNESCO, at least 43% of the total languages being spoken across the world are in danger of extinction. Moreover, many languages around the world have less than 1,000 speakers now. Linguists (语言学家) and researchers believe that by the end of the century, at least half of the world’ s languages will have died.

Language activists and people who speak these endangered languages spare no effect to fight back. Scientists believe that digitalization might be our only hope to preserve some of these quickly disappearing languages in the online world.

For example, Oxford University Press launched Oxford Global Languages a few years ago, advocating “digitally underrepresented” languages. They are focused on promoting languages that might have close to a million speakers worldwide, but have little or no online presence. Therefore, they have been creating digital dictionaries as a fundamental building block to help preserve them.

There have been countless other projects like this with the same aim. Another is the Rosetta Project,which aims to create a handheld digital library that will carry more than 1,500 languages. It will be appropriately sized to fit nicely into our hands, and will come with around 13,000 pages of information. Projects like these have as their main goals to ensure the preservation of local languages long after their speakers have died.

Countless languages will continue to perish as the remaining speakers die. Of course, we cannot only rely on digitization to deal with worldwide languages loss. However, it is a step in the right direction. These digital tools offer endangered languages many opportunities to bounce back and survive.

Worried about the loss of rainforests and the ozone layer? Well, neither of those is doing any worse than a large majority of the 6,000 to 7,000 languages that remain in use on Earth. One half of the survivors will almost certainly be gone by 2050, while 40% more will probably be well on their way out. In their place, almost all humans will speak a small number of languages——Mandarin, English, Spanish.

Linguists(语言学家)know what causes languages to disappear, but what's less often remarked is what happens on the way to disappearance: languages' vocabularies, grammars and expressive potential all disappear. "Say a community goes over from speaking a traditional Aboriginal(土著的)language to speaking a Creole," says Australian Nick Evans, a language experts, "you leave behind a language where there's very fine vocabulary for the landscape. All of that is gone in a Creole. As speakers become less able to express the wealth of knowledge that has filled ancestors' lives with meaning over thousands of years, it's no wonder that communities tend to become weakened."

Due to the huge losses, some linguists struggle against the situation, for example, training many documentary linguists in language-loss hotspots such as West Africa and South America.

However, not all approaches to the preservation of languages will be particularly helpful. Some linguists are boasting(自夸)of more and more complicated means of recording languages: digital recording and storage, the Internet and mobile phone technologies. But these are encouraging the quick style of recording trip: fly in, switch on digital recorder, fly home, download to hard drive, and store gathered material for future research. That's not quite what some endangered-language experts have been seeking. Michael Krauss from the University of Alaska complained openly that linguists are playing with technology research while most of their raw data is disappearing.

Who is to blame? Linguists who go out into communities to study, document and describe languages, argue that theoretical linguists, like Noam Chomsky, who draw conclusions about how languages work, have had so much influence that linguistics has largely ignored the continuing disappearance of languages.