60% of languages may go
06/08/2004 07:09  - (SA)  

EU tripping over tongues SA languages boosted Silent Night in 330 languages

Leipzig - More than 60% of the world's 6 700 spoken languages and dialects are threatened with eventual extinction due to the domination of a few widely used languages, a linguist warned on Thursday.

Balthasar Bickel of Leipzig University said that in some cases there were minority languages "spoken only by two or three old people."

He was speaking on the opening day of an international linguistic congress here called Syntax of the World's Languages.

The meeting, ending on Sunday, is attended by about 200 specialists from around the world who will consider the future of minority languages such as Breton, the native Celtic language of Brittany in western France, and Zulu, the Bantu tongue of South Africa.

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