If not, this leaves increasingly fragile language fluency to elderly speakers, often monolinguals. When commenting about why this essay appears in two colonial languages, this is precisely the reason Aymara and many other languages need protection. Often with indigenous languages, there is no standardized spelling. Because Andean languages such as Aymara and Quechua are ancient, there is deep and wide variation, even in close geographical proximity. At the highly local level, some variations are mutually intelligible, but any separated by distance and time, begin to fall away from shared vocabulary, if not linguistic structures.

I hope this response adds a more concerning perspective to endangered language – and the ‘humor’ of it’s absence in text here – due regrettably, to its gradual silent death. Wikipedia can have a role in language retention and revitalization. Each language whose light begins to flicker, overrun by higher status languages, is a loss to humanity. Open-source may be the best hope for vitalization; Wikipedia is a promising global repository for this.

Ha ha ! And in Aymara ?