DPA
Phnom Penh - The world's rich array of languages is shrinking, UNESCO said, with one language becoming extinct every two weeks. By the end of the century, the UN's cultural body said it expected today's 6,700 languages to be halved. With them will go untold cultural diversity. It is a bleak tale and seemingly unstoppable although not every endangered language is on UNESCO's list. One called Na'vi even has its own listing on Wikipedia, where its 23-page entry covers pronunciation and grammar to frustrate the most talented linguist.
But Na'vi, whose name will be familiar to many moviegoers, is a fiction: It was invented for James Cameron's blockbuster movie Avatar, and even the US language professor who created Na'vi cannot speak it fluently. Technically, that makes Na'vi extinct, although its inventor has high hopes it would catch on.
At the other end of the spectrum is S'aoch, an ethnic minority language spoken in southern Cambodia that experts said predates Na'vi by 6,000 years. S'aoch is at least a working language with 10 fluent speakers.
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