Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth - many of them not yet recorded - may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain.     Throughout human history, the languages of powerful groups have spread while the languages of smaller cultures have become extinct. This occurs through official language policies or through the allure that the high prestige of speaking an imperial language can bring. These trends explain, for instance, why more language diversity exists in Bolivia than on the entire European continent, which has a long history of large states and imperial powers.     As big languages spread, children whose parents speak a small language often grow up learning the dominant language. Depending on attitudes toward the ancestral language, those children or their children may never learn the smaller language, or they may forget it as it falls out of use. This has occurred throughout human history, but the rate of language disappearance has accelerated dramatically in recent years.     You might be interested in the National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project (conducted in collaboration with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages) which strives to preserve endangered languages by identifying language hotspots - the places on our planet with the most unique, poorly understood, or threatened indigenous languages - and documenting the languages and cultures within them. For more information, please visit http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices/