The diversities of the languages and cultures around the world makes it such a wonderful and beautiful place to live in. Which makes the discovery by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation that over half of the world's languages will disappear by the end of this century.

With the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages. Every two weeks, a language is lost after its final living speaker dies, the Living Institute for Endangered Languages says.

An example is the case of Bo, a native language of the Bay of Bengal’s Andaman Islands whose last speaker, Boa Sr, died at 85 resulting in the extinction of the language and the over a millennia of rich history of the Andamanese, whose descendants were migrators from Africa.

However, this process is neither inevitable nor irreversible: well-planned and implemented language policies can bolster the ongoing efforts of speaker communities to maintain or revitalize their mother tongues and pass them on to younger generations.

UNESCO's Endangered Languages Programme supports communities, experts and governments by producing, coordinating and disseminating tools for monitoring, advocacy, and assessment of status and trends in linguistic diversity.
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