lost 97 percent of our remaining languages

Cultura Germanica
Most of those 6,000 languages are actually moribund, now spoken only by older people and being learned by few, if any, children. Moribund languages are being eliminated not so much through murder of their speakers (as in the past) as by a more insidious process: the use of a few dominant national languages in governments, schools, businesses, movies, videos, and on the Internet. At this rate, by the end of this century we shall have lost 97 percent of our remaining languages, and barely 200 will survive. That would be a gigantic intellectual and cultural loss for all of us.