Paris - Some 2,500 of the world's 6,000 languages are currently threatened with extinction, according to the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, launched by UNESCO on Thursday in Paris.

"The death of a language means at the same time the disappearance of a cultural heritage, from stories through legends to proverbs and jokes," UNESCO head Koichiro Matsuura said.

This Atlas was the result of an international collaboration of more than 30 linguists from around the world, some of whom had already been involved in the previous two editions, UNESCO said. The editor-in-chief is Christopher Moseley, whose works include the Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages.

Mosely said that about 200 languages have died out over the past three generations. Last year, the Alaskan language Eyak vanished with the death of its last speaker, Marie Smith Jones.

The most common reasons for the disappearance of a language are wars and the forced displacement of a people. Languages also vanish because emigrants replace their native tongue with the language of their new home to better integrate, Moseley said.

However, examples also exist, notably in Australia, where threatened languages are now being spoken by the young, lending hope that the tongues with survive.

The regions with the greatest linguistic diversity, such as Melanesia, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America, are also the ones with the most endagered languages.

But every region of the world is home to languages that are in danger of dying out. In France. for example, 13 languages are described by the Atlas as "severely endangered," including Breton, Languedocian and Norman.

The online edition of the Atlas is available at www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages. (dpa)