As economic opportunities expand, there is a great temptation for small populations to abandon their native language in favor of the dominant regional language in order to expand their economic opportunities.

This is the conclusion of Dr Tatsuya Amato, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. Amato and his colleagues used the criteria for defining endangered species established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature to measure the health of the world’s languages.

According to the researchers, the three primary risk factors for language extinction are: small population size, small geographical habitat and population change or decline in speaker numbers. Using these datasets, the team determined that levels of per capital GDP (Gross Domestic Product) correlated to loss of language diversity. The more successful the regional economy, the faster the language declined.

“As economies develop, one language often comes to dominate a nation’s political and educational spheres. People are forced to adopt the dominant language or risk being left out in the cold – economically and politically. Of course everyone has the right to choose the language they speak, but preserving dying language is important to maintaining human cultural diversity in an increasingly globalized world,” said Amato in a statement.

As examples of the most at risk languages, the researchers point to the Upper Tanana spoken by aboriginal people in Eastern Alaska which has only 24 speakers remaining. The Wichita language, an ancient language spoken by North American Plains Indians now has only 1 fluent speaker and the languages of the aboriginal people of Australia’s Northern Territories are now in decline or gone altogether.

“Languages are now rapidly being lost at a rate of extinction exceeding the well-known catastrophic loss of biodiversity,” according to the research published in the Sept. 3 edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The team is urging immediate action by taken in the world’s most developed economies in order to maintain language diversity.