Words Fail Us

linguistics professor and author shares a personal selection from the thousands of languages on the brink of disappearing

How about if we all volunteered to learn an endangered language? - You can put me down for Ket:

Ket is the only Siberian language with a tone system where the pitch of the voice can give what sound like identical words quite different meanings. (Much like Chinese or Yoruba). To add to the difficulty for any westerner wishing to learn it, it also has extremely complicated word structure and grammar.