Thousands of languages are spoken mainly by adults, but not by their offspring, reported London's Independent newspaper. And the push to communicate in one of the three most popular tongues — English, Spanish or Mandarin — threatens to destroy the languages that are left.

"Ninety percent of languages today are each spoken by less than 100,000 people. With most languages being spoken by a small number of individuals, that makes them very vulnerable," said Steve Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen, in the Netherlands.

Only 200 to 250 languages are spoken by more than a million people, and English, Spanish and Mandarin are expanding faster than any of the other popular tongues, Levinson said in the Independent.

"Unless something amazing happens, the estimates for the rate of loss are probably right," said Levinson.

Matthias Brenzinger of the University of Cologne in Germany, who for the past year has rated how endangered languages are, said the scale of the problem is huge. "Most of the currently receding languages will disappear without even being recorded," he said.

Levinson points to Papua New Guinea, which boasts the richest diversity of languages in the world, as a case of language replacement. Many young people there communicate in "tok psin," which literally means "talk pigin" English, than their native language, the Independent reports.

English is becoming more popular because many people believe their children will be better off speaking it. Spanish and Chinese are growing largely because of expanding populations in the countries that use it, Levinson said.

"Why should we be worried? For all sorts of reasons, including sentiment. We will have lost the products of human creativity and the extent of language variation gives us insight into the nature of ourselves," he said.