1Of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken today, nearly half are expected to fall silent within this century.
2That striking statistic is frequently quoted, though linguists disagree sharply about how precisely such long range predictions can be made.
3A language is rarely killed outright; more often, its own speakers gradually abandon it under sustained economic and social pressure.
4Parents simply stop transmitting the ancestral tongue because they believe, sometimes quite correctly, that it limits their children's future opportunities.
5Contrary to widespread popular belief, the extinction of a language means far more than merely losing a vocabulary list.
6Each language encodes ecological knowledge, oral history, and ways of categorizing the world that translation cannot fully capture.
7Revitalization programmes in New Zealand and Hawaii were initially dismissed as sentimental, yet both produced new generations of fluent speakers.
8The Maori model succeeded not primarily through government decrees but through community run preschools popularly known as language nests.
9In hindsight, it was not funding but the willingness of elders to speak exclusively to infants that proved genuinely decisive.
10Nevertheless, no revived language returns unchanged; modern Hebrew differs considerably from its ancient ancestor in sound and structure.
11So when we speak of saving a language, we should really ask who is saving it, and for whom.