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Endangered

Children no longer learn it at home; the youngest speakers are of the parental generation.

UNESCO calls this grade definitively endangered (3): “The language is no longer being learned as the mother tongue by children in the home. The youngest speakers are thus of the parental generation.”

The document adds a detail that is easy to miss and hard to forget once seen: “At this stage, parents may still speak their language to their children, but their children do not typically respond in the language.” The break is audible in a single household conversation, before it is visible in any statistic.

This Atlas shortens the label to endangered. The threshold it marks — the end of transmission to children — is the one that matters most.

The first four run from least to most endangered. The last two sit outside that scale.