Dear Duolingo: What's the least spoken language in the world?

Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for learners. Catch up on past installments here.

Hello, learners! It’s Dr. Emilie Zuniga back on Dear Duolingo. My last posts, on prepositions and the hardest languages to learn, highlighted how vibrant and varied human languages can be. But today, we’re confronting what happens when that vibrancy declines: the least spoken languages in the world.

Our question this week:

Unfortunately, identifying the “least spoken language” isn’t as simple as checking a list, especially since there are few resources or statistics about many of the world’s 7,000 languages. What we do know is that thousands of languages are currently endangered—as of 2025, about 44% of the world’s languages are at risk of disappearing. 

Across the globe, languages become endangered for many of the same reasons: shift to another language (usually for economic reasons or to assimilate to a larger community), lack of support from government and schools, migration, displacement, and even outright suppression of minority languages by those in power.

Below are five languages that are among the world’s “least spoken.”

Taushiro

Where it’s spoken: Peru
Language family: language isolate (no known relatives)
Number of speakers: 1

Taushiro has only one known fluent speaker. It became endangered rapidly in the 20th century due to disease, displacement, and language shift toward Spanish and neighboring indigenous languages. With no younger speakers, Taushiro’s survival now depends entirely on language documentation—the collaboration of community members and speakers to write down everything known about Taushiro.

Kusunda

Where it’s spoken: Nepal
Language family: language isolate
Number of speakers: 1–2 fluent speakers

Kusunda, once spoken by a semi-nomadic hunting community, is unrelated to any other known language. Many factors have contributed to the language's near disappearance: loss of traditional lifestyles, assimilating  into the larger Nepali-speaking community, and declining population numbers. Recently, local revitalization efforts have begun, but there are still very few people who know the language fluently.

Njerep

Where it’s spoken: Cameroon
Language family: Benue-Congo (Niger-Congo)
Number of speakers: fewer than 5

Njerep has not been used as a daily language for decades. Most remaining speakers are elderly and have only partial knowledge of it. Over generations, the community gradually shifted to larger regional languages, especially Mambila. As younger people connected more with surrounding linguistic groups, Njerep fell out of use.

Ket

Where it’s spoken: Siberia (Russia)
Language family: Yeniseian (Ket is the only surviving member)
Number of speakers: around 30

Ket is the last remaining language of the Yeniseian family, once spoken widely across central Siberia. Its decline accelerated during the Soviet era, when assimilation policies pushed indigenous groups to use Russian in schools and public life. Urbanization and shifts away from traditional lifestyles made it increasingly difficult for younger generations to learn the language from their parents and grandparents. Today, only a few elders speak Ket fluently, making it one of the rarest languages in Eurasia.

Tanema

Where it’s spoken: Solomon Islands
Language family: Oceanic (Austronesian)
Number of speakers: 1

Tanema once had a small but active community of speakers. Over time, however, they shifted to a related local language (Teanu) for daily communication. Intermarriage with people from other language communities, a small population size, and the pressure to use a shared community language accelerated Tanema’s decline—and today, only one speaker remains.

When a voice falls silent

Every language—and their community—holds unique knowledge, culture, and history. This is why documenting and revitalizing endangered languages is so important: It doesn’t just preserve words and grammar patterns, it also helps protect ways of experiencing the world.

For more answers to your language and learning questions, get in touch with us by emailing dearduolingo@duolingo.com.