language death
Just yesterday I was teaching the first class of an introductory linguistics course, and I asked students how many languages they thought were currently spoken in the world. Guesses ranged from one to ten thousand, which was pretty good for a first class. When the last version of Ethnologue came out, it claimed there were 6,912 languages in the world. As of two days ago, there are only 6,911: the last traditional speaker of Eyak, a native language of Alaska, died at 89 years of age.