For governments at least it seems that finding out more about the world we live in is worth doing only if it generates wealth. One side effect of the infotech and communications revolution is the rapid disappearance of minority languages around the world, since only a few majority languages are viable in a globalized, information-based economy. Many linguists predict that at least half of the world's 6,000 or so languages now spoken will be dead or dying by the year 2050. Andrew Woodfield, director of the Centre for Theories of Language and Learning in Bristol, England, suggested in a 1995 seminar on language conservation that people do not yet know all the ways in which linguistic diversity is important. We have inductive evidence based on past studies of well-known languages that there will be riches, even though we do not know what they will be.
Language extinction is accelerated today for some of the same reasons as species extinction.
These include population pressures and the spread of industrialization. The World Future Society is exploring the implications of the disappearance of languages around the world. Ethnic legacies of music, history, literature, and folklore may be lost. Social scientists - anthropologists, sociologists, etc. Speakers of the languages will gradually lose their connections to ancestral customs because their history and rituals cannot easily continue when the languages that contain them die.