Every 14 days another language dies. Most are languages we have never heard of, in faraway lands. But some are closer than we may think.

National Geographic and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages have identified six places on earth that possess the highest diversity of native languages with the greatest threat of extinction. British Columbia is code red among these endangered language hotspots, threat level severe.

I work with global languages every day, yet until now I had no idea that my own province was the ancestral home to 32 distinct native languages which have flourished here for millennia. But it’s like I’ve discovered the greatest bookstore in the world on the day before it goes out of business: all of B.C.’s surviving aboriginal languages, from Carrier to Beaver to Coast Salish to Squamish, are facing mass extinction.

The map below from the Ethnologue shows the distribution of languages in B.C. At this writing, except for Pentlatch, Sooke, Songish, Semiahmoo, Comox, Nicola and Tsetsaut, all have at least one mother tongue speaker left alive. More.

See: Lori Thicke | How Does Language Impact YOUR World?

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