 The phenomenon of the death of languages has been known for a long time. Some languages have disappeared without leaving any trace. Others jealously guard their own secrets because no one has succeeded in deciphering them. Finally, there are those languages which have evolved and given birth to new languages. We know that, like any living thing, a language placed in a specific context blossoms or fades away and dies. This e-lecture gives a brief description of the phenomenon of language death and discusses the following aspects. First, we will look at our heritage. That is our duty to preserve and protect languages and cultures. Then we will look at the mechanisms of language death and language endangerment before finally we will look at some aspects that can be implemented to protect languages from dying out by multilingualism. There are about 7000 languages spoken in the world today. Most of them in several dialects. Many of them are no longer spoken and are now extinct. Each language reflects a unique world view and a unique culture complex mirroring the manner in which a speech community has resolved its problems in dealing with the world and has formulated its thinking, its system of philosophy and understanding of the world around it. Each language is the means of expression of the intangible cultural heritage of people and it remains a reflection of this culture for some time even after the culture which underlies its decays and crumbles often under the impact of an intrusive, powerful, usually metropolitan, different culture. However, with the death and disappearance of such a language an irreplaceable unit in our knowledge and understanding of human thought and world view is lost forever. For this reason, the protection of endangered languages is among the most important goals of modern linguistics. But what exactly is language endangerment? A language is said to be endangered or at least potentially endangered if it is no longer learned by the children or at least by a large part of the children of that community say at least 30%. If a large portion of the children switch to another language then more and more children will act likewise until there are no child speakers left and the language will eventually disappear with the death of its last speakers. Languages become endangered resulting in a state of being on the edge of extinction for several reasons. The first of these reasons is the forceful splitting up and transplanting of the speech community that speaks a given language putting small groups or even only individuals of the speech community into communities that use other languages. This will inevitably kill the original language of the transplanted people in a short amount of time. A second situation in which a language becomes endangered and threatened to disappear occurs when a particular speech community comes into face-to-face contact with carriers of a more aggressive culture who speak another, usually metropolitan language. The first culture is overwhelmed and threatened with disintegration because mastery of the intrusive language offers economic advantages to the speakers of the weaker culture. Parents of children in the weaker culture tend to encourage their children to use the language of the stronger culture in preference to their own and will themselves tend to speak to their children in that preferred language. The young generation will soon learn to despise their traditional language and regard it as worthless and inferior and cease to be interested in it. A third group of causes for the endangerment or even disappearance of local and minority languages can be indirectly attributed to the actions of people of a dominant culture that lead to the destruction of the environment, the habitat and the livelihood of the speakers of local languages. For example, through mining, oil drilling, excessive tree-felling, damming of rivers, warfare, etc. These actions lead to the transplanting and scattering of the speakers of the local languages with disastrous results for their languages. Other types of causes of the endangerment or disappearance of very small to moderately small local languages include natural catastrophes such as volcanic eruptions, severe earthquakes, tsunamis, gigantic waves hitting shorelines after a sea quake, floods, wildfires, new devastating diseases and then there might be epidemics resulting from contacts between speakers of local languages and those of a dominant culture where the former have no resistance to diseases such as influenza or tuberculosis and in the past to smallpox and the like. It is important to know that a language which is in danger of disappearing can still be saved, provided that an appropriate language policy is adopted. The case of Hebrew is a good example of the revival of a language that ceased to be a living community language thousands of years ago. To define the degree of language endangerment an important factor is the number of speakers of a given language. Languages spoken by a large group are less vulnerable to the danger of disappearing than others. However, the problem here is that the question of a large or small group of speakers is quite relative and is determined by the number of speakers of surrounding languages which are culturally aggressive. Let us look at two examples. Australia and India. They help us to illustrate this point. In Australia, very few of the many indigenous languages ever had or even have today more than a thousand speakers but they are nonetheless regarded and referred to as large languages because the average number of speakers of viable Australian languages with fewer speakers is a few hundred or even less. In Australia, about one percent of the population is of aboriginal descent of whom 47,000 have some knowledge of an aboriginal language. Here are some examples. There are languages such as Al Yawar and Anindil Yakwa with a thousand or more speakers. And then there are highly endangered languages such as Jirbal, Yidin and Gumach with a few hundred or even less speakers. In 1995, about 200 aboriginal languages were still spoken. Now only a hundred or so remain and most of them highly endangered. Aboriginal languages were traditionally spoken by relatively small groups but each had its territory, its culture and the transmission assured. When the Europeans arrived, they occupied these territories, massacred the people and almost destroyed aboriginal cultures. In India, on the other hand, in areas around India and in India itself where languages such as Hindi, Gujarati or Bengali have millions of speakers, languages like Brahui with two million and Hintco with 600,000 speakers are regarded as small languages and will feel pressure from neighbouring languages with these several dozens or even hundreds of millions of speakers. So the question of large or small numbers of speakers is quite relative and is determined by the number of speakers of other languages surrounding languages which are under pressure. The dying and disappearance of languages has been going on for thousands of years as a natural event in human society. But at a slow rate, with few languages here and there in the world disappearing slowly over the years, this trend sometimes increased locally for a short period of time. For instance, when a powerful, conquering group of warriors attacked and killed certain small groups of people such as the North American Indians speaking a variety of different languages and whose languages died with them. Or when natural disasters such as violent volcanic eruptions or great floods wiped out small tribes of people who spoke a number of local languages. However, such events did not bring about the disappearance of hundreds of languages at the same time and at a steady or increasing rate and did not result in a drastic and catastrophic reduction in the number of languages spoken in the world. The current situation, however, over the past 300 years or so has seen a dramatic increase in the death and disappearance of languages. A few of those such as Latin, Greek or Sanskrit, to name a few, have been kept alive artificially and are still widely known and sometimes even spoken in certain special circumstances by quite a number of persons and maybe in other cases by few persons in the case of ancient Greek and the languages spoken in former Egypt. Today, however, at a steadily increasing rate in many parts of the world we have to face a situation in which 3,000 or more languages that are still spoken are endangered, seriously endangered or even dying out. In Europe, believe it or not, our language index lists several dozens of endangered languages and furthermore, there are still viable languages such as Welch, which we can put over here, that already show signs of being potentially endangered and might soon enter the phase where they will face disappearance. There are many examples of the four main reasons we have already given for language endangerment. A paradoxical way to prevent a language from becoming endangered is to promote bi and multilingualism, which is already the norm in many parts of the world with several thousand especially smallish languages spoken by bi and multilinguals irrespective of whether they are just a few members of a speech community or very many or the entire community. The main advantages of bilingualism can be seen in what you call bilingual speech performance. Now, bi and multilingualism make it possible for speakers of languages under threat from languages spoken by bearers of aggressive culture and civilizations to acquire a good knowledge of the latter for economic and other reasons while maintaining a good knowledge of their original languages. This allows them to preserve their cultural and traditional identity and maintain their own self-respect and self-esteem. Bi and multilinguals tend to be superior to monolinguals in having more flexible, more alert minds and a greater and quicker thinking capacity on the basis of a much greater volume of memory which they have for mastering two or in the case of multilinguals even more than two different language systems with different vocabularies, different grammars, different sound systems and different idiomatic expressions. Bi and multilingualism from very early childhood onwards to be maintained past the age of six years is the most advantageous quality a person can possess. Unfortunately, these aspects are not encouraged in most of the major cultures. The speakers of whose languages are overwhelmingly monolingual and wrongly regard monolingualism as the norm and the preferred state for human language. Let us summarize. In this e-lecture, we have discussed an essential aspect of our heritage the protection of endangered languages from becoming extinct. We discussed the main reasons of language endangerment and language death but also pointed out some measures to overcome the trend language policy and multilingualism. If you want to find out more about endangered languages or languages that are extinct, I recommend consulting our Language Index where you can examine a large corpus of audio-supported language samples and if you wish, contribute with an entry of an endangered language of your own in order to save it for our successors. So consider this e-lecture not only a lecture on the topic itself but as an appeal to all of you to help us here. Thank you very much.