▪ Abstract Since the late 1980s, language endangerment and death have been discussed as if the phenomena had no connection at all with language birth. More recently the phenomena have been associated almost exclusively with the intense and pervasive economic globalization of same period, a process that some authors have reduced too easily to the McDonaldization phenomenon. Moreover, the relation of globalization to different forms of colonization has been poorly articulated. As a matter of fact, little of the longer history of population movements and contacts since the dawn of agriculture has been invoked in the literature on language endangerment to give some broader perspective on the mechanisms of language birth and death and on the ecological factors that bear on how they proceed. This review aims to remedy these shortcomings in our scholarship.