the languages of the world are safe, and that ‘a monoglot millennium
will never come’.
It was at that point I decided it was essential to write this book –
a complementary volume, in some ways, to English as a global language.
The need for information about language loss is urgent. As
the quotations from the various professional groups suggest, we
are at a critical point in human linguistic history, and most people
don’t know.
Language death is real. Does it matter? Should we care? This
book argues that it does, and we should. It aims to establish the
facts, insofar as they are known, and then to explain them: what is
language death, exactly? which languages are dying? why do languages
die? – and why apparently now, in particular? It addresses
three difficult questions. Why is the death of a language so important?
Can anything be done? Should anything be done? The last
two questions are especially difficult to answer, and need careful
and sensitive debate, but, in this author’s mind, the ultimate
answers have to be a resounding YES and YES. The plight of the
world’s endangered languages should be at the top of any environmental
linguistic agenda. It is time to promote the new ecolinguistics
– to echo an ancient saying, one which is full of colourful and
wide-awake green ideas (see p. 32). It needs to be promoted
urgently, furiously, because languages are dying as I write.
Everyone should be concerned, because it is everyone’s loss. And
this book has been written to help foster the awareness without
which universal concern cannot grow.
The book would have been written in 1997, if I had not been
sidetracked by a different but related project, which eventually
achieved literary life in the form of a play, Living on, which tried to
capture imaginatively some of the emotional issues, for both linguists
and last speakers, surrounding the topic of language death.
Whether a dramatic as opposed to a scholarly encounter with the
topic is likely to have greater impact I cannot say. All I know is that
the issue is now so challenging in its unprecedented enormity that
we need all hands – scholars, journalists, politicians, fund-raisers,
artists, actors, directors . . . – if public consciousness (let alone
Preface ix