Ten years ago, Michael Krauss, a professor at the University of Alaska, shocked his colleagues with his prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world would disappear within a century.
'You would think that there would be some organised response to this situation, some attempt to determine which languages can be saved and which should be documented before they disappear,' says Sarah G Thomason.
One factor that always seems to occur in the death of a language, according to Hans-Jurgen Sasse, is that speakers start regarding their own language as inferior to the majority language.
'Ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction is multilingualism,' argues James Matisoff. Even uneducated people can speak a number of languages if they start as children.' Many people in the world are at least bilingual, and in some places it is common to speak three or four languages.
Questions
1. Decisions need to be made about priorities in language rescue.
2. Languages currently in use face extinction in the foreseeable future.
3. There is a solution to the problem of languages dying out.
4. A language maybe dying when its speakers begin to value it less.