Less than five percent of current world languages are in use online, according to a recent study by prominent linguist Andr\u00c3\u00a1s Kornai — and the Internet may be helping the other 95 percent to their graves.<\/p>\n
Those startling conclusions come from a paper published in the journal PLOSOne in October titled, appropriately, \u201cDigital Language Death.\u201d\u009d The study sought to answer a question that\u2019s both inherently fascinating and little-discussed: How many languages exist online? (And, on the flip side, how many don\u2019t?)<\/p>\n
For reference, at least 7,776 languages are in use in the greater offline world. To measure how many of those are also in use on the Internet, Kornai designed a program to crawl top-level Web domains and catalog the number of words in each language. He also analyzed Wikipedia pages, a key marker of a language\u2019s digital vibrancy, as well as language options for things like operating systems and spell-checkers.<\/p>\n