From 2013... Of the 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered; this vastly underestimates the danger, less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm

Kornai A (2013) Digital Language Death. PLoS ONE 8(10): e77056. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077056

Abstract: Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. Here we argue that this consensus figure vastly underestimates the danger of digital language death, in that less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide.

Conclusions
We have machine classified the world’s languages as digitally ascending (including all vital, thriving, and borderline cases) or not, and concluded, optimistically, that the former class is at best 5% of the latter. Broken down to individual languages and language groups the situation is quite complex and does not lend itself to a straightforward summary. In our subjective estimate, no more than a third of the incubator languages will make the transition to the digital age. As the example of the erstwhile Klingon wikipedia (now hosted on Wikia) shows, a group of enthusiasts can do wonders, but it cannot create a genuine community. The wikipedia language policy, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Language_proposal_policy, demanding that “at least five active users must edit that language regularly before a test project will be considered successful” can hardly be more lenient, but the actual bar is much higher. Wikipedia is a good place for digitally-minded speakers to congregate, but the natural outcome of these efforts is a heritage project, not a live community.

A community of wikipedia editors that work together to anchor to the web the culture carried by the language is a necessary but insufficient condition of true survival. By definition, digital ascent requires use in a broad variety of digital contexts. This is not to deny the value of heritage preservation, for the importance of such projects can hardly be overstated, but language survival in the digital age is essentially closed off to local language varieties whose speakers have at the time of the Industrial Revolution already ceded both prestige and core areas of functionality to the leading standard koinés, the varieties we call, without qualification, French, German, and Italian today.

A typical example is Piedmontese, still spoken by some 2–3 m people in the Torino region, and even recognized as having official status by the regional administration of Piedmont, but without any significant digital presence. More closed communities perhaps have a better chance: Faroese, with less than 50 k speakers, but with a high quality wikipedia, could be an example. There are glimmers of hope, for example [2] reported 40,000 downloads for a smartphone app to learn West Flemish dialect words and expressions, but on the whole, the chances of digital survival for those languages that participate in widespread bilingualism with a thriving alternative, in particular the chances of any minority language of the British Isles, are rather slim.

In rare cases, such as that of Kurdish, we may see the emergence of a digital koiné in a situation where today separate Northern (Kurmanji), Central (Sorani), and Southern (Kermanshahi) versions are maintained (the latter as an incubator). But there is no royal road to the digital age. While our study is synchronic only, the diachronic path to literacy and digital literacy is well understood: it takes a Caxton, or at any rate a significant publishing infrastructure, to enforce a standard, and it takes many years of formal education and a concentrated effort on the part of the community to train computational linguists who can develop the necessary tools, from transliterators (such as already powering the Chinese wikipedia) to spellcheckers and machine translation for their language. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this is Basque, which enjoys the benefits of a far-sighted EU language policy, but such success stories are hardly, if at all, relevant to economically more blighted regions with greater language diversity.

The machine translation services offered by Google are an increasingly important driver of cross-language communication. As expected, the first several releases stayed entirely in the thriving zone, and to this day all language pairs are across vital and thriving languages, with the exception of French – Haitian Creole. Were it not for the special attention DARPA, one of the main sponsors of machine translation, devoted to Haitian Creole, it is dubious we would have any MT aimed at this language. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose the Haitian government would have, or even could have, sponsored a similar effort [32]. Be it as it may, Google Translate for any language pair currently likes to have gigaword corpora in the source and target languages and about a million words of parallel text. For vital languages this is not a hard barrier to cross. We can generally put together a gigaword corpus just by crawling the web, and the standardly translated texts form a solid basis for putting together a parallel corpus [33]. But for borderline languages this is a real problem, because online material is so thinly spread over the web that we need techniques specifically designed to find it [16], and even these techniques yield only a drop in the bucket: instead of the gigaword monolingual corpora that we would need, the average language has only a few thousand words in the Crúbadán crawl. To make matters worse, the results of this crawl are not available to the public for fear of copyright infringement, yet in the digital age what cannot be downloaded does not exist.

The digital situation is far worse than the consensus figure of 2,500 to 3,000 endangered languages would suggest. Even the most pessimistic survey [34] assumed that as many as 600 languages, 10% of the population, were safe, but reports from the field increasingly contradict this. For British Columbia, [35] writes:

Here in BC, for example, the prospect of the survival of the native languages is nil for all of the languages other than Slave and Cree, which are somewhat more viable because they are still being learned by children in a few remote communities outside of BC. The native-language-as-second-language programs are so bad that I have NEVER encountered a child who has acquired any sort of functional command (and I don’t mean fluency - I mean even simple conversational ability or the ability to read and understand a fairly simple paragraph or non-ritual bit of conversation) through such a program. I have said this publicly on several occasions, at meetings of native language teachers and so forth, and have never been contradicted. Even if these programs were greatly improved, we know, from e.g. the results of French instruction, to which oodles of resources are devoted, that we could not expect to produce speakers sufficiently fluent to marry each other, make babies, and bring them up speaking the languages. It is perfectly clear that the only hope of revitalizing these languages is true immersion, but there are only two such programs in the province and there is little prospect of any more. The upshot is that the only reasonable policy is: (a) to document the languages thoroughly, both for scientific purposes and in the hope that perhaps, at some future time, conditions will have changed and if the communities are still interested, they can perhaps be revived then; (b) to focus school programs on the written language as vehicle of culture, like Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, etc. and on language appreciation. Nonetheless, there is no systematic program of documentation and instructional efforts are aimed almost entirely at conversation.

Cree, with a population of 117,400 (2006), actually has a wikipedia at http://cr.wikipedia.org but the real ratio is only 0.02, suggestive of a hobbyist project rather than a true community, an impression further supported by the fact that the Cree wikipedia has gathered less than 60 articles in the past six years. Slave (3,500 speakers in 2006) is not even in the incubator stage. This is to be compared to the over 30 languages listed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics for BC. In reality, there are currently less than 250 digitally ascending languages worldwide, and about half of the borderline cases are like Moroccan Arabic (ary), low prestige spoken dialects of major languages whose signs of vitality really originate with the high prestige acrolect. This suggests that in the long run no more than a third of the borderline cases will become vital. One group of languages that is particularly hard hit are the 120+ signed languages currently in use. Aside from American Sign Language, which is slowly but steadily acquiring digital dictionary data and search algorithms [36], it is perhaps the emerging International Sign [37] that has the best chances of survival.

There could be another 20 spoken languages still in the wikipedia incubator stage or even before that stage that may make it, but every one of these will be an uphill struggle. Of the 7,000 languages still alive, perhaps 2,500 will survive, in the classical sense, for another century. With only 250 digital survivors, all others must inevitably drift towards digital heritage status (Nynorsk) or digital extinction (Mandinka). This makes language preservation projects such as http://www.endangeredlanguages.com even more important. To quote from [6]:

Each language reflects a unique world-view and culture complex, mirroring the manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the world, and has formulated its thinking, its system of philosophy and understanding of the world around it. In this, each language is the means of expression of the intangible cultural heritage of people, and it remains a reflection of this culture for some time even after the culture which underlies it decays and crumbles, often under the impact of an intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan, different culture. However, with the death and disappearance of such a language, an irreplaceable unit in our knowledge and understanding of human thought and world-view is lost forever.

Unfortunately, at a practical level heritage projects (including wikipedia incubators) are haphazard, with no systematic programs of documentation. Resources are often squandered, both in the EU and outside, on feel-good revitalization efforts that make no sense in light of the preexisting functional loss and economic incentives that work against language diversity [38].

Evidently, what we are witnessing is not just a massive die-off of the world’s languages, it is the final act of the Neolithic Revolution, with the urban agriculturalists moving on to a different, digital plane of existence, leaving the hunter-gatherers and nomad pastoralists behind. As an example, consider Komi, with two wikipedias corresponding to the two main varieties (Permyak, 94,000 speakers and Zyrian, 293,000 speakers), both with alarmingly low () real ratios. Given that both varieties have several dialects, some already extinct and some clearly still, the best hope is for a koiné to emerge around the dialect of the main city, Syktyvkar. Once the orthography is standardized, the university (where the main language of education is Russian) can in principle turn out computational linguists ready to create a spellchecker, an essential first step toward digital literacy [39]. But the results will benefit the koiné speakers, and the low prestige rural Zyrian dialects are likely to be left behind.

What must be kept in mind is that the scenario described for Komi is optimistic. There are several hundred thousand speakers, still amounting to about a quarter of the local population. There is a university. There are strong economic incentives (oil, timber) to develop the region further. But for the 95% of the world’s languages where one or more of these drivers are missing, there is very little hope of crossing the digital divide.