| Marcelo Dascal Endangered Languages | 
|
|  |
 |  |
Six thousand living languages in the world
...but there were many more
In Meso-America, at the time of contact (77k) between European colonizers
and natives, a wide variety of native languages were
spoken.
But they gradually ceased to be spoken, under the
dominance of Spanish (61k).
The same is true in Brazil (96k), where the originally spoken languages
disappeared under the dominance of Portuguese
(80k).
Although there are still about 150 languages spoken in Brazil, only about 60 of which are documented in some way, we may soon approach a practically monolingual situation in this country (114k).
Remember that it is living languages, living traditions,
living cultures, and living peoples who disappear along with the
colors in the map.
