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Technology Contributes to Global Language Loss Transportation and telecommunications have reduced the time it takes to travel to different parts of the world to send information. It is also contributing to the loss of language diversity around the world. Two recent books explore the problem of language loss. Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine published a book called, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages and David Crystal's Language Death note that of the world's roughly 6,000 languages, many are endangered and less than half will survive the next century. Each book has strengths. Crystal does a nice job of explaining why we should be concerned about language loss. Nettle and Romaine take a long-term global perspective placing language loss in the context of development of agriculture and advances in technology. Several reviews of the books are available on the internet:
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