February 21, 2006 marked the sixth annual International Mother Language Day, proclaimed by UNESCO in 1999. The purpose of International Mother Language Day is to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. International Mother Language Day 2006 was devoted to the topic of languages and cyberspace.
February 25, 2006 marked a milestone in the human population of the planet earth, according to the International Programs Center US Census Bureau, passing the 6.5 Billion mark on this day.
So how many languages are spoken by all these people? More than 6,000, but according to UNESCO, more than half of these may disappear by the end of the century. UNESCO is targeting some of its programs to safeguard languages in danger of extinction, in order to preserve the rich culture some of these languages hold. Internet is a key target of these efforts, since about 90% of the world's languages are not present in any form on the Internet. According to numbers published by UNESCO, 72% of Internet sites are in English, German at 7%, French, Japanese and Spanish at 3% and the remaining 12% in the other languages.
Languages in greatest danger of extinction are those with no written version whatsoever (about 20%). Africa, where roughly one-third of the world's languages are spoken, is the area in the most danger. And in an effort to bring this problem to center stage, the African Union has declared 2006 a year of African languages.
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