Africa Talks Climate found that many indigenous languages have no words for the science of climate change, leaving warnings unintelligible to the people most at risk.
A list of seven languages hanging on by a thread is entertaining, but the real predictors of language death are duller and far more reliable than speaker counts.
A column of numbers found under adobe rubble near Trujillo records a Peruvian language that has been extinct for centuries. One page against a very long silence.
The world loses about 25 languages a year. At a conference in Carmarthen, 100 academics argued in nine languages about whether any of them can be saved.
Stephen Pax Leonard will live a year with the Inughuit to record Inuktun, an undocumented language with about 1,000 speakers and a thinning sheet of ice.