It will be useful (a) to summarise the way in which European dominance was imposed on most of the rest of the world, and then withdrawn; and (b) to outline the recent developments in communication; before (c) describing the ways in which languages and dialects have been and are being lost, and the reasons for this.

Invasions

The white race originally lived just in Europe and the immediately adjacent parts of Africa and Asia. Then, from the fifteenth century, they began to colonise the rest of the world, establishing political dominance and imposing their languages – English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Dutch, French, German and Italian – on the peoples they governed.

The first continents to be systematically taken over were the Americas from the sixteenth century. These were followed by Southern Africa, South Asia, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, the islands of the Pacific, New Guinea, most of South-east Asia and, finally, almost all the rest of Africa. By 1910 the only major countries that were not governed by white people were Liberia, Ethiopia, Thailand, China, Tibet, Japan and Korea. Then, from 1947,tne pendulum swung back. The indigenous peoples either seized power for themselves or were hurriedly granted it by their erstwhile masters (only France and the USA have resolutely held onto some of their colonial territories).

After the Second World War, white dominance was broken in every part of the world where the indigenous people still comprised the majority of the population – every nation in Africa, Asia, New Guinea and the Pacific Islands.