This year is dedicated to multilingual education. Spanish is a language that has the future secured..Spanish is a language that has the future secured. Around 7,000 languages are spoken in the world, of which 50% are likely to disappear in a few generations.

Of the languages that survive, 96% will correspond to languages that will only be spoken by 4% of the world population. The rest of the population will speak a few languages that will become majority. This forecast prompted the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) to establish in 1999, February 21 as International Mother Language Day. This year, the celebration is dedicated to multilingual education. According to Unesco, languages, with their complex intertwining with identity, communication, social integration, education and development, are of strategic importance for people and for the whole planet. However, due to the processes of globalization that weigh on languages there is a threat of the disappearance of many languages.

Juan Uriagereka, professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, says that "the languages that have the future assured (English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, German or Japanese) belong to three or four language families, being generous in the calculation. That is, the majority of the dozen and a half linguistic families that exist today that have survived for thousands of years are bound to disappear. This is a tragedy that we have not yet understood, comparable to the loss of wild habitat or global warming. "

Source of the news EL PAIS - Ana Camarero