from today's newspaper:

the Worldwatch institute fears that until the end of the 21st century half of the about 6800 living languages will be extinct. 83 year old Mary Smith from Anchorage (in Canada, my newspaper says) is for example the only speaker of Eyak and there are only 6 speakers of Arikapu left. The country with most different languages is Papua Newguinea, they count 832. More than half of all languages come from only 8 countries. Unesco guesses that there are at least 100,000 speakers necessary for a language to survive.

Wolfgang