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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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CREDITS

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David Goldenberg | Script Writer, Narrator and Director Lizah van der Aart | Storyboard Artist Sarah Berman | Illustration, Video Editing and Animation Nathaniel Schroeder | Music

MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC https://neptunestudios.info

OUR STAFF

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Lizah van der Aart • Sarah Berman • Cameron Duke Arcadi Garcia i Rius • David Goldenberg • Melissa Hayes Alex Reich • Henry Reich • Peter Reich Ever Salazar • Leonardo Souza • Kate Yoshida

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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-humans-talk-biology-language/

McWhorter, J. (2016). What’s a Language, Anyway?. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference-between-language-dialect/424704/

IUCN RedList. (2024). Summary Statistics. https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/summary-statistics#Summary%20Tables

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

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

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