The size of the task is daunting, and requires a massive e ff ort on the part of linguistics departments the world over. 46 It is an e ff ort, moreover, which requires a fresh commitment, especially in those departments which have devoted the bulk of their intellectual and pedagogical energies to domains of linguistics which are at the opposite end of the scale from those required here. There is a growing concern, largely fuelled by the greater awareness of endan- germent, that an important balance has been lost within linguistics – that the subject has become too ‘theoretical’ and insu ffi ciently ‘empirical’. 47 No one, I trust, is trying to set up the kind of false oppositions which were around half a century ago. The need for theoretical awareness on the empirical side is axiomatic. There have been excesses on that side too – notably the exclusive use of one analytical framework, tagmemics, in many parts of the world because of its favoured status as the approach used by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in its work in relation to Bible translation. But when we encounter training courses in linguistics which have given their students negligible amounts of phonetics exposure, or which omit courses on fi eldwork and the associated anthropolog- ical/social perspectives required (to do with place names, personal names, genealogy, kinship, ethnobotany, etc.), it is plain – at least, to this writer – that we are a long way from having found the correct balance. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that a signi fi cant part of the encounter with endangered languages is in relation to intervention, and this puts the fi eld of preventive 46 The cuts that have been made in schools and departments of languages in various parts