The Language Counting Paradox

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Lots of languages and species are going extinct, but because others keep getting found or described, the official counts of languages and species are still increasing.

LEARN MORE
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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Language death: when a language loses its last known native speaker.
- Species extinction: the termination of a species by the death of its last member.
- Ethnologue.com: the world’s foremost authority on the languages of the world and their current status.

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David Goldenberg | Script Writer, Narrator and Director
Lizah van der Aart | Storyboard Artist
Sarah Berman | Illustration, Video Editing and Animation
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REFERENCES
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Anderson, S. (2012). Languages, Species, and Biological Parallels. Oxford University Press Blog. https://blog.oup.com/2012/07/why-do-h...

McWhorter, J. (2016). What’s a Language, Anyway?. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/internati...

IUCN RedList. (2024). Summary Statistics. https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources...

Ritchie, H. (2022). How Many Species Are There? Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-s...

Eberhard, Dave. (2024). Personal Communication. Senior Linguistics Consultant for Ethnologue. https://www.sil.org/biography/david-m...

Brown, E. (2018). Millennial Aboriginal Australians Have Developed Their Own Language. Atlas Obscura. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles...