“What is death to a linguist? What is, so to speak, worth mourning? I know this: there are sixty-nine hundred languages in the world. More than half are expected to die within the next century. In fact, it’s estimated that every two weeks, a language dies. I don’t know about you, but that statistic moves me far ore than any statistic about how many animals die or people die in a given time, in a given place. Because when we say language dies, we are talking about a whole world, a whole way of life. It is the death of imagination, of memory. It makes me much sadder than I could ever possibly express. Even with all my languages, there still aren’t the right words. ”