Russian 158,000,000 9. Japanese 124,000,000 10. Language is the most efficient means of transmitting a culture, and it is the owners of that culture that lose the most when a language dies. Every culture has adapted to unique circumstances, and the language expresses those circumstances. While a community may not lose its sense of identity when it loses its language, identity is closely associated with language.
All peoples identify their culture as closely with their languages as with their religion.
What we talk about, think, and believe is closely bound up with the words we have, so the history of a culture can be mapped in its language. There was a point in Russian history when most of the population lived in communes all their lives so that a commune was a Russian's world so long as they were at peace. Millions of cultural stories like this are at risk. People from other cultures are also impoverished when any language dies. The scientific search for Universal Grammar, the common starting point for all grammars that human children seem to be born with, depends on our knowing what all human languages have in common.