Something that should be pointed out here... it is necessary to understand exactly what the problem is. The particular languages going extinct are going to be VERY hard to preserve as living languages.
Nobody is talking about regional dialects with extensive written culture dying out. Many of these language, distinctive as they are, have very few speakers and are extremely 'tough sells'. IIRC, something like only 20% of current existing languages even have a written form. You can romanize it, of course, but that's not the point - the point is that if your language doesn't have a written form, than odds are everything about your culture was orally transmitted, making it that much harder to keep alive. It's -very- hard for an orally transmitted language to continue when the handful of speakers are a tiny dispersed minority. I once knew a guy in Oklahoma who said he only knew of TWO speakers of his language - himself and his son. Can you imagine? All it takes for the language to die is for one person to die and another to lose interest.
The point of keeping a language alive is not to document it and freeze it in amber. Keeping a language alive means keeping the culture surrounding it going. When you have so few speakers, you're talking about an act of collective willpower by the culture itself that is very hard to do once the active culture is down to so few members.
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Something that should be pointed out here... it is necessary to understand exactly what the problem is. The particular languages going extinct are going to be VERY hard to preserve as living languages.
Nobody is talking about regional dialects with extensive written culture dying out. Many of these language, distinctive as they are, have very few speakers and are extremely 'tough sells'. IIRC, something like only 20% of current existing languages even have a written form. You can romanize it, of course, but that's not the point - the point is that if your language doesn't have a written form, than odds are everything about your culture was orally transmitted, making it that much harder to keep alive. It's -very- hard for an orally transmitted language to continue when the handful of speakers are a tiny dispersed minority. I once knew a guy in Oklahoma who said he only knew of TWO speakers of his language - himself and his son. Can you imagine? All it takes for the language to die is for one person to die and another to lose interest.
The point of keeping a language alive is not to document it and freeze it in amber. Keeping a language alive means keeping the culture surrounding it going. When you have so few speakers, you're talking about an act of collective willpower by the culture itself that is very hard to do once the active culture is down to so few members.