UNESCO grades a language's vitality on six levels: safe, vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct. The grades turn mainly on whether children still learn the language. This map uses Glottolog's different five-level scale.
Key takeaways
- UNESCO's scale has six levels, from safe to extinct, and rests mainly on how the language passes between generations.
- This map does not use UNESCO's levels. It shows Glottolog's five-level scale, from not endangered to nearly extinct.
- On Glottolog's scale, 1,542 languages here are threatened, 1,752 shifting, 415 moribund and 294 nearly extinct.
- The two scales are related but should not be matched level for level.
How the two scales work
UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger sorts languages by how far they are from safe [1]. Its scale has six levels, and the four in between safe and extinct are defined by who still speaks the language [1]:
| UNESCO level | What it means |
|---|---|
| Safe | The language is passed on between generations |
| Vulnerable | Children use the language, but only at home |
| Definitely endangered | Children no longer learn it |
| Severely endangered | All the remaining speakers belong to older generations |
| Critically endangered | The youngest speakers are grandparents or older, often partial speakers |
| Extinct | No speakers remain |
Glottolog uses a different system called the Agglomerated Endangerment Status. It combines ratings from several earlier sources, including UNESCO's atlas, ELCat (a catalogue of endangered languages) and Ethnologue, and it has been extended with others since [2]. Its levels are not endangered, threatened, shifting, moribund, nearly extinct and extinct [2].
The map shows the first five of Glottolog's levels. Extinct languages are left off.
An example from our data
The map uses Glottolog's scale, not UNESCO's. Of 6,722 living languages, 2,688 (40%) are not endangered, 1,542 (22.9%) threatened, 1,752 (26.1%) shifting, 415 (6.2%) moribund and 294 (4.4%) nearly extinct.
You can see the scale applied on language pages. Hawaiian is rated moribund, Welsh threatened and Maori shifting. Each page shows the Glottolog status only. The facts page and data sources explain where the numbers come from, and the homepage covers languages at risk.
The thing people get wrong
It is tempting to treat "threatened" as UNESCO's "vulnerable", "moribund" as "critically endangered" and so on. The scales do not line up level for level. They were built differently, with different wording and for different purposes, and Glottolog's levels are aggregated from several sources rather than copied from UNESCO [2]. A language can sit at different points on the two.
For that reason, do not quote a status from this map as "UNESCO says". Check UNESCO's atlas for its own rating, and bear in mind that UNESCO's categories have themselves been under review [1]. The map also has nothing on how fast a language is changing, only a snapshot.
If you need UNESCO's own classification of a specific language, use its atlas directly. If you want to compare languages on this site with each other, use the Glottolog status shown on every language page, since it is applied in the same way throughout.
Frequently asked questions
Which scale does this map use?
Glottolog's Agglomerated Endangerment Status, not UNESCO's. It has five levels on the map, from not endangered to nearly extinct.
How many levels does UNESCO use?
Six: safe, vulnerable, definitely endangered, severely endangered, critically endangered and extinct.
Sources
- Endangered language, Wikipedia.
- Glottolog: language status, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Every figure from our own map is worked out from the datasets on the data sources page (checked against Glottolog and Glottography, retrieved 13 October 2026).