In 1226, Kubla Khan ordered the slaughter of all the inhabitants of a central Asian city he was besieging because his father, Genghis, had been killed during the course of the siege. The holocaust was carried out as ordered, and one of its results was that the language of Tangut, all the speakers of which were inside the city, was never spoken again.

While language death - or 'language loss' as Andrew Dalby prefers to call it - rarely happens as violently or as suddenly as with Tangut, it does occur frequently. And at present the mortality rate of languages is at an all-time high. An estimated 5,000 languages are in use globally today: we are losing one of these languages every two weeks. If this trend continues, we will be a monoglot planet in under two centuries. For Dalby, a linguist and historian, this is a profound danger, as serious in its way as the rapid depletion of biodiversity. He has written a passionate and lucid book which seeks to answer two important questions: why is language loss occurring, and why is it such a menace to the future of humanity?

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