Catalogue of Endangered Languages

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) is a major resource for information on the endangered languages of the world. It is available to the public via the Endangered Languages Project website.

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages provides information on each of the world's currently endangered languages. It provides information on:

The information about each endangered language in ELCat comes from published sources and direct communications from individuals with specialized knowledge of specific endangered languages. All information provided in the Catalogue is referenced to its original source (e.g. journal article, book, personal communication, etc.), and information from multiple different sources is provided for each language, where available.

Users of the Endangered Languages Project website are encouraged to contribute suggestions for improving the information in the Catalogue. All user suggestions are reviewed by Regional Directors, specialists in the languages of specific regions of the globe.

Discoveries made as the Catalogue was created have resulted in new knowledge about the world's languages. For example, on the one hand, many languages included in other reference works proved spurious, either not to exist or not to be distinct from other languages, and were removed; on the other hand, ELCat has added 260 new languages not identified by the ISO 639-3 standard. ELCat has found that 45% of all currently-spoken languages are endangered, based on the 3116 still-spoken endangered languages in ELCat compared to the 6861 still-living languages listed by Ethnologue. ELCat finds that 299 languages have fewer than 10 speakers and that 792 are "critically" or "severely" endangered. Importantly, contrary to the often-repeated claim that a language becomes extinct every two weeks, ELCat discovered that on average about one language each three months becomes extinct, about 4 per year.

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages was developed by the linguistics departments at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UHM) and Eastern Michigan University (EMU) between 2011 and 2016. The structure of ELCat was designed during the National Science Foundation-funded workshop on the Endangered Languages Information and Infrastructure Project (ELIIP), held at the University of Utah in 2009. The development ELCat was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation, under the supervision of Principal Investigators Lyle Campbell (UHM) and Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry, and later Veronica Grondona (EMU). ELCat and the Endangered Languages Project website are now permanently housed at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, with ELCat under the direction of Gary Holton (UHM).

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