In Colombia, the official name is Spanish. However, there are also the native languages of Colombia have been represented in 65 indigenous languages and 2 creole and palenquero languages and the Roma language of the gypsy people, born of the mixture between languages, a product of the contact between European population and African population Which came to the American continent enslaved.
The communities that speak the creole languages are located in San Basilio del Palenque - Bolívar (palanquero), in the islands of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina (creole). The speakers of the indigenous languages are scattered throughout the Colombian territory and the speakers of the Roma or Gypsy language are in 11 Kumpañy in different cities of the country, they have a population of approximately 1,300,000 people.
David Harrison, president of Swarthmore College's linguistics department and co-founder of the NGO Institute for Living Languages for Threatened Languages, states in his book 'When Languages Die' (2016) that "extinction of a language means erosion or extinction Ideas, forms of knowledge, and ways of referring to the world and human experience. " "No culture," Harrison adds, "has the monopoly of human genius and you never know where the next brilliant idea comes from.... We lose old knowledge if we lose languages."