It seems someone has estimated that half of the world’s languages will disappear in the next fifty years: “fifty percent in fifty years” sounds suspect to me.
As I heard from a British professor, we could see this phenomenon either as the triumph of the unimportant language spoken on an island close to the the shore of Europe (which ended ruling the world) or like a global biodiversity disaster.
However you prefer to see it, there is something I’d like to suggest which is hiding on the title of this post: I would have used “farewell” rather than a word like “requiem”, coming from an already dead language. :)
