Like most linguists of a certain age, I came to the topic of language endangerment accidentally. I first began to study the Salish-Pend d'Oreille language in northwestern Montana in 1981, not because it was endangered but because it would provide insights into the Pacific Northwest linguistic area – a large group of northwestern languages belonging primarily to three different Native American language families (Salishan, Wakashan, and Chimakuan) that have come to resemble each other as a result of widespread multilingualism. I expected that understanding one member of the Salishan language family well would eventually help me understand the whole family, including its history, and I could then move on to compare Salishan languages to the languages of the other families in the Pacific Northwest, so that I could discover how all the groups had influenced each other. I still believe all that; but now I also believe that it would take me another century or so to understand this one language thoroughly, and for many years now my scholarly motive for continuing the study has to do with a fascination with the language rather than with the larger intellectual goal of studying language contact phenomena in the region. Meanwhile, another motive has become more and more prominent as I have become more aware of the precarious state of the language: I want to contribute whatever I can to the Salish and Pend d'Oreille tribes' efforts to preserve and revitalize their language, by documenting as much of it as I can while it is still possible to work with fluent speakers. I estimate that there are now fewer than twenty elderly tribal members who learned their heritage language in infancy and continued speaking it at least through the early decades of their lives. Time is short.

Then when I began thinking about endangered languages as a general topic, I realized that my first sustained fieldwork experience, fifty years ago, was also an endangered-language project: my dissertation research was a dialect study based on fieldwork I conducted in the former Yugoslavia.