 Now, it's really important to recognize that a language is not just vocabulary or grammar. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes in the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought and ecosystem of social, spiritual, psychological, ecological possibilities. And to lose half the languages in a generation is to literally lose half of humanity's collective knowledge because the importance of a language is not a correlate of the number of people who speak it. The importance of a language is the fact that by definition it is a branch in the human tree that goes back for multiple generations.