1Every two weeks, somewhere in the world, the last speaker of a language dies.
2With that death, humanity loses stories, songs, and knowledge gathered over centuries.
3My own grandmother spoke a regional language that my parents never learned properly.
4She called it the language of lullabies, because no one wrote it down.
5Today, community groups are recording elderly speakers before their words disappear forever.
6Schools in some regions now teach children both the national and the local language.
7Festivals celebrating minority cultures attract young people who want to reconnect with their roots.
8Technology helps too, since apps and videos make learning cheap and accessible everywhere.
9Critics say one global language would be simpler, but simplicity is not everything.
10A language carries a whole way of seeing the world inside its words.
11When we protect small languages, we protect the diversity of human thought itself.