In 1978, Peter Austin was introduced to Jack Butler, a 77-year-old man from the mountainous iron mining district of Maroonah Station, 1,000km north of Perth in western Australia.

Butler was the last speaker of the aboriginal language Jiwarli.

None of his children had any interest in Jiwarli, having long since abandoned it in favour of English, and Butler was anxious it should not die with him.

Over the next eight years before his death, Butler and Austin recorded tapes of the Jiwarli language, history and culture and created a Jiwarli dictionary. Austin, an Australian professor of linguistics, based at the University of Melbourne, is now the world's only Jiwarli speaker, and but for his and Butler's intervention yet another language would have disappeared, unnoticed.

There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world, yet 95 per cent of the population speaks just 15 of them. Economic imperialism has gone hand-in-glove with linguistic imperialism, as people abandon their mother tongues in favour of the globally dominant English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. As a result, hundreds of languages have disappeared in the past 50 years, and experts predict there will be fewer than 3,000 languages left by the turn of the next century...