A language dies roughly every few months, and most are never recorded
A language is considered dead the moment its last fluent speaker dies, or its last community shifts to another tongue. More than half the world's endangered languages sit in just eight countries, and linguists estimate a substantial share of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today could fall silent this century, mostly through gradual generational shift rather than dramatic events. Once a language dies undocumented, the knowledge and worldview encoded in it are usually lost for good.