For many indigenous people world-wide, language is an endangered species, and when language dies, so, too, in many ways, does a people. I've seen it in more veiled, deceptive circumstances in the non-indigenous world, such as in Italy where the replacing of perfectly useful Italian words by English is a signpost for the Americanization of the whole society. The disappearance of Native American languages, though, is even more portentous, as it signals the absorption of a people into the culture that historically would rather have been rid of them completely.
Kara Brigg's article in India Today is both a perceptive analysis and a call to action.
