The above strong and emotive quote poses the key problem which motivates this book. Krauss indicated that most of the endangered languages then spoken would stop being spoken during the twenty-first century. In Krauss (2007a: 3) he increases this further, and indicates that 95 per cent of the world’s languages are endangered to some degree. It is clear that a high proportion of the world’s linguistic diversity is endangered, as Robins and Uhlenbeck (1991), Wurm (1996, 2001), Brenzinger (2007a), Moseley (2007), UNESCO (2009) and recent editions of the Ethnologue since Lewis and Simons (2014), among many other sources, also indicate.