https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2065567/europe-severely-endangered-languages-full-list
Published 7 June 2025, this article (Express) reports that UNESCO currently lists 52 European languages as “severely endangered” — meaning they are spoken mainly by older generations, with generational transmission collapsing. The piece uses the example of Budukh (in north-eastern Azerbaijan, ~200 speakers) to illustrate the scale of risk. Although the article is not academic in tone, its core message is accurate: Europe is not only home to major/global languages — it is also one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world, and many of those languages may disappear within a generation if no action is taken.
For our multilingualism / European language policy discussions this is extremely relevant.
Europe loves the slogan “language diversity = cultural heritage”, but this article reminds us of the brutal demographic reality: institutional multilingualism at EU level (Catalan, Irish, French, German etc) coexists with language death at the periphery (small communities, rural spaces, cross-border minorities).
In other words:
the EU defends multilingualism symbolically at the centre, while dozens of languages die at the margins.
For professional fields (translation/localisation, corpora building, language-tech, AI training data, lexicography) this is not just anthropology — if a language disappears before it enters digital infrastructure, it effectively disappears twice: socially and digitally.
And there’s a deeper question: what counts as “Europe” in the multilingual imaginary?
Is Europe only the languages that can reach Brussels plenary microphones — or also those spoken by 200 people in the Caucasus?
This is where policy, identity and technology intersect.
Questions for readers:
- Should EU multilingualism strategies explicitly include endangered languages — or is that outside EU competence?
- What is the best way to help an endangered language: money, schooling, community documentation, AI corpora, media production, prestige?
- If Europe can mobilise millions to add Catalan/Basque/Galician in Brussels… should it also invest in saving Budukh?