WE LIVE IN an era of cultural convergence. Of the world’s 5,000 languages, at least 3,000 are at risk of disappearing. On every continent there are peoples who fear loss of those things by which they define themselves: heritage and landscape as well as ways of speaking. This convergence is, in fact, not a matter of us all becoming the same. Differences of many kinds endure, and there are Indigenous and rural communities where isolation of territory is matched to some degree, and often as a result of enduring defiance, by pride in what they call tradition.
Yet there is another kind of difference ...
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