Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers，small, tightly knit groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12, 000 languages between them.
几千年来，语言一直处于兴起与消亡中，不过最近兴起的越来越少，消亡的越来越多。当世界上还在以狩猎采集者为主时，这些联系紧密的小部落就会独立发展出各自的语言模式。一些语言专家认为，一万年前，当世界上只有五百万到一千万人口时，他们之间可能会说12000种语言。
Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialisation, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalisation and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.
不久之后，这些人中的许多人开始定居下来成为农民，语言变得越来越固定，数量也越来越少。近几个世纪来，贸易、工业化、民族国家的发展和普及义务教育的普及，特别是过去几十年的全球化和更好的沟通，都导致了大量语言的消失，英语、西班牙语和汉语等优势语言正日益占据主导地位。
At present, the world has about 6, 800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1, 000; Africa 2, 400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800.The median number of speakers is mere 6,000, which that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.
目前，世界上大约有6800种语言，这些语言的分布极不均衡。通常温暖地区的语言相对较少，说的人较多，而湿热地区的语言较多，说的人较少。欧洲只有大约200种语言；美洲大约有1000种；非洲有2400种；亚太地区可能有3200种，其中巴布亚新几内亚就占了800多种。每种语言会讲的人中位数只有6000，世界上一半的语言所使用的人数少于6000。
Already well over 400 of the total of 6, 800 languages are close to extinction, with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busuu in Cameroon (eight remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark): none of these seems to have much chance of survival.
在总共6800种语言中，已经有超过400种濒临消亡，只有一些老年人会讲。随便举几个例子，比如喀麦隆的Busuu （剩下8人会讲）、墨西哥的Chiapaneco （150人）、美国的Lipan Apache（2人或3人）或澳大利亚的Wadjigu （1人，存疑）：这些语言看起来都没有存在下去的可能。
