The Red Book of Endangered Languages was published by UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

 and collected a comprehensive list of the world's languages currently facing extinction. It has been replaced by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

History

In 1992 the International Congress of Linguists (CIPL) meeting in Quebec

Quebec

Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

 discussed the topic of endangered languages, as a result of which it formed the Endangered Languages Committee. It held an international meeting also in 1992 in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 to place the topic before the world and initiate action. The meeting was considered important enough to come under the authority of UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

.

At the instigation of Stephen Wurm

Stephen Wurm

Stephen Adolphe Wurm was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist.- Biography :Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and Hungarian-speaking Anna Novroczky, and was christened Istvan Adolphe Wurm...

 the committee resolved to create a research center, the International Clearing House for Endangered Languages (ICHEL) and to publish the UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages based on the data it collected. Shigeru Tsuchida was to start the research center. It began in 1994 at the University of Tokyo

University of Tokyo

, abbreviated as , is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in Hongō, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university...

 with Tasaka Tsunoda as its director.

Meanwhile the initial reports on endangered languages had already been collected and submitted to UNESCO by regional experts in 1993. These were now turned over to ICHEL, which created a website (given under "External links") for the red book. It continues to be updated regularly.

Last updates

In February 2009, UNESCO launched an online edition of the Atlas of endangered languages which covers the whole world, contains much more information than previous printed editions and offers the possibility to users to provide online feedback, in view of its constant updating.
This work generally provides interesting insight but also dubious information such as the classification of the dialects of Occitan as different languages claiming for every dialect that (for instance): "Languedocian has been retired and replaced with [oci] on false grounds"