Group members: Chawisara Uswachoke, Ming Cheng, Yue Xu
The map above shows the distribution of the extinct and endangered languages around the world. We can observe that every continent (with Antarctica as an exception, of course) and almost every country has one or more languages that are either vulnerable, endangered, or extinct.
It is especially interesting to see that most vulnerable/extinct languages are located along the borders of each country and in the small island countries, such as the southern border of China and the west Coast of United States of America.
Now, let's narrow down the scope for a bit and zoom into our country -- the United States of America:
* The area of the circle represents the number of speakers for the language.
* Languages with number of speakers of 3000 or above are labeled on the US map.
Wow, the extinct languages are so concentrated in the west coast and the sate of Oklahoma. Let's zoom in to look at the west coast! Wonder what happened to those languages?!
Look at all the languages at west coast. Most of them are severely or critically endangered, or even extinct. We suspect that this might have been because the west coast used to be part of Mexico and Canada during the 1900s; but this is just a speculation.
The graph on the left shows the cumulative number of languages that became extinct over time. Note that the extinction years are approximated for some languages, since it is not easy to track the exact dates when a language dies out. We can see that a lot of languages are becoming extinct in the recent years.
So as a conclusion...
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