There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but experts believe that by 2100 more than half of those languages will become extinct.”Languages are living entities, they are born, they live, reproduce, and eventually die,” said Assistant Professor of Spanish Alfonso Abad Mancheño.

According to The Washington Post, more than 3500 worldwide languages are expected to die by 2100.

“It is inevitable that small languages are going to die,” said Mancheño.

Marshall Jeffries is not ready to accept the death of his tribal language. Jeffries is president of the Native American Club and member of the Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation.

Jeffries’ tribal lands are located in Pleasant Grove, the area of North Carolina now called Burlington.

Jeffries holds language classes every Saturday for tribal youth in an effort to preserve the language of the Occaneechi.

“Language is directly tied to culture and world view,” said Jeffries. “The two of those are in turn tied to identity.”

“When you lose one of those things completely, you start to lose your sense of identity.”

Although Jeffries is making an effort to revitalize his language, he realizes that it still may be lost.

“Our language could still become extinct just because of the difficulty of learning it and the time it takes,” said Jeffries.

Jeffries and the other teachers encourage the youth to speak the language outside of class.

“Ten years ago, teaching and speaking the language would have been met with resistance because the elders refused to use it because they thought they might get killed,” said Jeffries. “Now there are more and more parents sitting around the table on Saturdays.”

The fear the elders had resulted from a movement implemented in the 1960s and 1970s that was pushing the government of the United States to make English the official language.

Although the efforts were never endorsed by the government, many Native Americans and immigrants stopped speaking their native languages.

“As long as people feel embarrassed, restrained or openly criticized for using a particular language, it’s only natural for them to want to avoid continuing to do what’s causing a negative response, whether it’s something overt like having your mouth washed out or more subtle like discrimination,” said Gregory D.S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages to The Washington Post.

A study conducted by Living Tongues found that the most endangered language areas include Siberia, northern Australia, the North American Pacific Northwest, and part of the Andes and Amazon.

Irish, often called Gaelic, is also on the list of endangered languages.

It is Ireland’s official language and is taught in Irish schools, but overall rarely spoken at home.

Continuing part-time lecturer in English Sandra Winters lived in Ireland for 10 years and said of western Ireland, “In these areas more and more schools are being created which treat Irish as the principal language.”

Winters said that when she got her Irish driver’s license she had to know some Irish in order to navigate in that area.

Even with this emphasis on the language, there has been a decline in the number of fluent speakers. When the country was founded in 1922 there were 250,000 fluent speakers. Today that number has fallen to around 30,000.

“For now Irish independence is too fresh for the language to die completely,” said Winters. “It is still kept alive as an emphatic statement of Irish intellectual independence and the indisputable vitality and richness of Irish culture.”

Mancheño pointed out that the Jewish people also understood language as part of identity. Hebrew had been considered a dead language at the spoken level, but was officially reborn in 1948 as a part of the creation of Israel.

Because Hebrew had been recorded, it was possible for the language to be revived.

Even though Irish is a recorded language, experts believe that it is following the typical stages of extinction.

Mancheño points out that all languages go through stages and that doesn’t necessarily mean extinction.

“There is not a stage of language that is the same as another stage,” said Mancheño. “For instance, the English we speak today is not the same as the English spoken in the 1960s, and that is because it is a living entity. (Language) lives in the people who speak it, and thus it also reflects a culture and a way of abstracting and naming the world.