During the past thirty years, much sociolinguistic work has been done on the maintenance and significance of native languages among ethnic minorities. Although such studies have made a notable progress, they have mainly been concerned with the languages of either native or immigrant minorities in the Western industrial societies. The fates of these minority languages have usually been described with sympathy and humanity, but, at the same time, very little attention has been paid to the global aspects of language endangerment in regions such as the circumpolar North