Rare Languages

When the phone rang at 5:00 on Friday night and a guy named Daniel said he needed the text of a Swazi marriage video translated into English by Monday morning, my first thought was no way. There were other urgent projects that I still had to finalize! Swazi! Who speaks that language? This is going to be an expensive project because it was a rare language, Friday night, a video, and RUSH!

How many languages can you name off the top of your head? 30? 40? 50 would be impressive. Even if you named 100, though, you would have identified only a fraction of the thousands spoken throughout the world.