This book provides an overview of the issues surrounding language loss. It brings together work by theoretical linguists, field linguists, and non-linguist members of minority communities to provide an integrated view of how language is lost, from sociological and economic as well as from linguistic perspectives. The contributions to the volume fall into four categories. The chapters by Dorian and Grenoble and Whaley provide an overview of language endangerment. Grinevald, England, Jacobs, and Nora and Richard Dauenhauer describe the situation confronting threatened languages from both a linguistic and sociological perspective. The understudied issue of what (beyond a linguistic system) can be lost as a language ceases to be spoken is addressed by Mithun, Hale, Jocks, and Woodbury. In the last section, Kapanga, Myers-Scotton, and Vakhtin consider the linguistic processes which underlie language attrition.

"This fine collection of papers is a worthy addition to the literature on language endangerment and obsolescence, which has been growing exponentially in recent years. For anyone interested in language contact, language obsolescence, and language shift (death), Endangered Languages is filled with much of value on this topical and important subject. Grenoble and Whaley are to be sincerely thanked for editing this collection." Anthropological Linguistics

"This volume is a vital addition to the literature supporting this important and growing movement within the field of linguistics and indigenous communities." Leanne Hinton, Language in Society

"...to approach this collection from the standpoint of a linguistic typologist is an enlightening task in itself: it forces a constructive engagement with material that the authors have put together with other ends in view...most of the contributions contain lingusitic descriptions, as illustations or evidence, which are detailed enough to interest formal analysts of linguistic diversity in their own right." Linguistic Typology