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From https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/03/25/how-revive-massachusetts-first-language/WflCNBgviT0cdGfbRNd1YL/story.html

How to revive Massachusetts’ first language
S.I. Rosenbaum
March 26, 2017

Those whose ancestors have always spoken English, the dominant tongue of global commerce, might not grasp how important it is for a language to have even a few fluent speakers, rather than none. Linguists estimate that more than 40 percent of the world’s languages are vulnerable to extinction within a generation. Around the world, indigenous people are fighting to preserve their dwindling languages. Reviving a language that had no native speakers left, as in the case of Wampanoag, is still harder. The barriers [Jessie Little Doe] Baird and her collaborators have encountered — beyond the logistical challenges, there are moral and ethical ones — typify the difficulties facing all the world’s threatened languages.

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