There are currently over 3,000 endangered languages in the world on the brink of extinction, and the rate at which languages and dialects are dying is alarming. According to National Geographic , one language vanishes from the face of the earth every 14 days, and few leave any recognizable traces. The least spoken languages in the world tend to only be spoken by a few elders of small communities, and — since learning a dying language rarely appeals to people trying to secure their place in a global economy — younger generations aren’t typically learning these languages from their parents or grandparents. Most of these at-risk languages also lack a writing system, making their preservation an even more daunting challenge. So what are the most vulnerable languages and language families on Earth—from small branches of larger families like Austronesian to isolated languages with no known relatives—and what’s being done to save them?…