Source: Milner-Gulland, Robin with Nikolai Dejevsky. 1989. Cultural Atlas of Russia and the Soviet Union 
Date Digitized:   February 2011

Map Description:
"Two great language families dominate the territory of the Soviet Union. The larger is the Slavonic, comprising the closely related Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian. Native speakers of Russian extend from the Gulf of Finland to the Pacific; nevertheless they are now less than half the total population. The other family is the Turkic, most of whose recognized languages and dialects are intercomprehensible: it extends from the Azerbayjan to Yakutia. Other non-Indo-European language families include the Finnic to the north and the Caucasian group to the south."

Other LL-MAP resources related to this project:

Map Creator:   LINGUIST List (Anthony Aristar)
Data Source:   Mosely Christopher. 2010. Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edn. Paris, UNESCO Publishing, Online version. http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/ (29 November 2010)
Contact:   llmaplinguistlist.org
Usage Notes/Copyright Status:   Used by Permission
Date Created:   29 November 2010

Map Description:
UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is a database intended to raise awareness about language endangerment and the need to safeguard the world’s linguistic diversity among policy-makers, speaker communities and the general public, and to be a tool to monitor the status of endangered languages and the trends in linguistic diversity at the global level.

Degrees of endangerment
The map designates the degrees of endangerment as based on UNESCO’s Language Vitality and Endangerment framework.

This establishes six degrees of vitality/endangerment based on nine factors. Of these factors, the most salient is that of intergenerational transmission.

Degree of endangerment	Intergenerational Language Transmission
safe	language is spoken by all generations; intergenerational transmission is uninterrupted >> not included in the map
vulnerable	most children speak the language, but it may be restricted to certain domains (e.g., home)
definitely endangered	children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home
severely endangered	language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves
critically endangered	the youngest speakers are grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently
extinct	there are no speakers left >> included in the Atlas if presumably extinct since the 1950s