... followed. In 1995 an Inter-national Clearing House for Endangered Languages was inaugu-rated at the University of Tokyo. The same year, an EndangeredLanguage Fund was instituted in the USA. The opening ... attempted a world-wide review only in 1974, anedition containing 5,687 languages.7The Voegelins’ survey, pub-lished in 1977, included around 4,500 living languages.8Since the1980s, the situation has ... the improve-ment of information-gathering techniques. The thirteenth editionof Ethnologue (1996) contains 6,703 language headings, and about6,300 living languages are classified in the International...