In Proc. 3rd Intl. Conf. on Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace, 2015

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In Kornai [2013] we demonstrated that over 95% of the world’s languages are digitally still. This means there is a small pool of roughly 400 languages, many spoken in Russia and the FSU [Comrie 1981], from which a final set of digital survivors, perhaps some 200 languages, will emerge. Since at this point the digital ascent of no more than a few dozen languages is assured, we need a more detailed assessment than the simple four-way classification put forth in Kornai [2013] which distinguished only Thriving and Vital languages (neither Heritage nor Still languages can survive in the obvious sense of being actively used in communication). Figure 1 at the end of the paper, based on the data given in Table 1, shows this distribution for languages of the FSU, with the Thriving language (star) in the top right being Russian, and the Vital languages (circles) largely corresponding to the main languages of former republics. Squares are Heritage languages such as Old Church Slavonic, and smaller arrows corresponding to the remaining languages are either for Borderline (rightward pointing arrow) meaning that the current statistical method is incapable of fully resolving their status or for Still (down arrow), the majority of languages in the FSU.