The observation that guides this chapter is that the place of speakers in language documentation is being transformed by linguists' understanding of language endangerment not just as a problem of diminishing data for the science of language, but as a problem of social justice and human flourishing that calls upon linguistic expertise for its amelioration. The chapter addresses some of the main issues surrounding the role of speakers that we see emerging in documentary linguistics, bringing to bear examples both from linguistics and from neighbouring disciplines. There are situations in which the preservation of cultural form is alien to the ideological complex by which the cultural life of a community is constituted. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, intense public attention was drawn to the issue of minority and indigenous rights by a number of international and grassroots organizations.