Language Diversity Index Tracks Global Loss of Mother Tongues. David Braun of National Geographic News Watch interviewed Maffi, David Harmon, and Jonathan Loh about the Index of Linguistic Diversity. “For the past several years, we had been hearing anecdotal reports about endangered languages–how we’re losing languages by the day, how we may lose 50-90 percent of languages before the end of the century. But nobody had any reliable quantitative data to corroborate these claims,” says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and director of Terralingua. “But now a new Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD), the first of its kind, shows quantitatively, for the first time, what’s really happening with the world’s languages.”

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