J. Linguistics (), –. Cambridge University Press DOI : .S Printed in the United Kingdom REVIEW ARTICLE Colonization, globalization and the plight of ‘ weak ’ languages SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE University of Chicago (Received July ; revised January ) Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing voices : the extinction of the world’s languages. Oxford : Oxford University Press, . Pp. x. .P The title of this article is in part intended to capture the essence of Nettle & Romaine’s very informative book about the ongoing or anticipated extinction of several languages around the world. It reflects two factors central to the authors’ arguments : colonization and globalization as causes of language endangerment and death. I recast the general scenario in terms of language contact marked by a competition for prevalence. According to the authors, this state of affairs has typically, though not always, favored the socio-economically powerful at the expense of the powerless. The present title also avoids the melodrama that pervades Nettle & Romaine’s otherwise impressive documentation of facts, which sometimes sounds like a political manifesto. I show below that this rhetoric, which is also evident in much of the related literature in linguistics, from Krauss () to Crystal () and Hage ge () and Maffi (), has typically not shed adequate light either on why the imminence of language extinction has not really been the same from one part of the world to another, or on what it really takes to keep a language alive. I cannot follow the tradition of shorter reviews, which start with comprehensive summaries of the contents of books and then use some space [] I am grateful to my Winter Ecology of Language Evolution class for motivating me to articulate more clearly some of the issues I raise below. I also thank Michel DeGraff, Sylvain Neuvel, Alison Irvine, Umberto Ansaldo, and an anonymous JL referee for feedback on the draft of this article. [] The subtitle is complemented with the following from the cover blurb : ‘ The world’s languages are dying. Ninety percent of them are expected to disappear in the next one hundred years. Why are they dying and what should we do about it ? ’ I argue below that it is debatable whether N&R’s answers to these questions are satisfactory. Nonetheless, their documentation style should reach the heart of whoever is concerned with the fate of indigenous languages especially in former European colonies.