Hundreds of the 6,000 or so languages of our planet are disappearing every year, dying one by one like the creatures on the Endangered Species List. Indeed, language-diversity and biodiversity have a lot in common, so, shouldn't we be alarmed about the disappearance of linguistic diversity as well? VANISHING VOICES tells the story of how and why languages are disappearing. Nearly 100 native languages once spoken in what is now California are near extinction, and most of Australia's 250 aboriginal languages have vanished. In fact, at least half of the world's languages may die out in the next century. The authors Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine assert that this trend is far more than simply disturbing. Making explicit the link between language survival and environmental issues, they argue that the extinction of languages is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. The authors contend that the struggle to preserve precious environmental resources-such as the rainforest-cannot be separated from the struggle to maintain diverse cultures, and that the causes of language death, like that of ecological destruction, lie at the intersection of ecology and politics. And while Nettle and Romaine defend the world's endangered languages, they also pay homage to the last speakers of dying tongues, such as Red Thundercloud, a Native American in South Carolina, Ned Madrell, with whom the Manx language passed away in 1974, and Arthur Bennett, an Australian, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram. In our languages lie the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Each language is a unique window on experience. VANISHING VOICES is a call to preserve this resource, before it is too late.