Of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken today, linguists estimate that almost half face (0) EXTINCTION (EXTINCT) within the century. Against this bleak backdrop, a small but determined movement for language 1REVIVE has taken root in communities from the Welsh valleys to the Peruvian Andes. Where only a handful of elderly 2SPEAK remain, scholars now work alongside them to record grammar, vocabulary and idiom before the opportunity is lost. The resulting 3LINGUIST archive often comprises decades of painstaking 4DOCUMENT, since even languages transmitted 5ORAL for centuries must now be rendered in a form that permits subsequent study and, ideally, classroom 6LITERATE. Critics occasionally accuse 7PRESERVE of sentimentalising what are, after all, living tongues; supporters reply that the 8MARGIN of minority languages has rarely been an accident, and that reversing it is therefore a matter of cultural justice as much as of academic interest.