Languages and dialects are dying every day, especially when we live in a world linked by computers and mass media, where people end up joining together in a few languages. Dialects spoken by smaller groups of people are covered by an official language of each nation, while linguists are trying to make them survive. Below you can see the lesser-used languages in the world.Kayardild (10 people) - Spoken at Bentinck Island, Australia, and islands around this language will also die soon.
Ume Sami (approximately 10 people) - On the course of the River Ume, Sweden, no one knows the exact number of people who can still speak this language, but surely it will not last long.
Pite Sami (approximately 20 people) - Spoken between Sweden and Norway this language is one of four belonging to the Sami dialect that do not have an official written language.
Votic (20 people) - More a language spoken in Russia, specifically in Ingria in the northwest. It was spoken by the Votes, a local population.
If you think the presence of the strange name Sami in a number of languages, know that this is a general name for the language group of Uralic languages spoken by the Sami people, who live in parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. But that does not mean that all languages are equal, since each people speak a language of their own and many of them are about to disappear from the earth.
Don't take some random journalist's word for it. There are probably dozens if not hundreds of languages with less than 10 native speakers surviving. Funny how all but one on this list are Uralic languages. At least Uralic isn't one of the whole language families facing extinction. The modern times with an unprecedented capability of communication is witnessing the largest drop in linguistic diversity ever seen. Sad but true.
The story use to be that aramaic (the language Jesus supposedly spoke) was a dead language. However, when I went to Iraq during the war in 2003, there were tons of people that spoke it.
Until a world census is done, we will never have the real truth on this.
Yet another fluff piece on the internet *yawn*
I don't think linguists have been telling a story like that. Experts on Semitic languages probably haven't missed the fact that Aramaic has continued developing since the Biblical times! A world census would be nice, but Ethnologue (a catalogue of the world's languages compiled by the SIL organization) comes close, when it comes to languages.
The web version of Ethnologue can be found here: http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp . It includes information like membership in a language family and estimated number of speakers. According to their statistics page (http://www.ethnologue.com/ethno_docs/distribution.asp?by=size), there are 133 languages with 1 to 9 speakers (that is, according to their sources; most of those are probably extinct by now).