Most of the world’s languages are either endangered or will be by the
end of this century, according to a report in the current issue of the
Indiana University Alumni Magazine. Author Daniel Comiskey says
linguists generally agree that it takes at least 100,000 speakers to
sustain a vocabulary, which means that 90 percent of the more than
6,000 languages spoken today could be extinct by 2100. The more people
become interconnected by networks, among them roads and computers,
Comiskey writes, the more so-called “predator” languages wipe out those
spoken less widely. An example of the latter: Kuskokwim, which is
unique to the sparsely populated region of Alaska’s Kuskokwim River.
The world’s principal languages, based on 2004 estimates, and the
numbers of people, in millions, who speak them:

Chinese (Mandarin) 873
Spanish 322
English 309
Hindi 180
Portuguese 177
Bengali 171
Russian 145
Japanese 122
German, standard 95
Chinese (Wu) 77
- www.ethnologue.com/ The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2005