According to the UNESCO, half of the 6,700 languages spoken today are in danger of disappearing before this century ends, and many altaic languages are also in danger of disappearing too. ASK REAL team has carried out field-work researches on endangered altaic languages for several years.

By the grant of the Korea Research Foundation, the Altaic Society of Korea started the REAL project to make digitalized archives of endangered altaic languages for the documentation and linguistic researches of those languages. In Ethnologue languages catalogue presented by SIL International, altaic languages are classfied into 65 languages, but we classfied altaic languages into 55 languages. Field-work researches on more than two third of 55 altaic languages have been carried out since 2003 until 2009. Altaic languages are distributed widely across Eurasia, and the speakers of those languages are under multi-lingual environment. And most of the areas, altaic languages are not official languages, therefore, in those countries, altaic languages are in danger of extinct.