Suzanne Romaine, former Merton Professor of English Language and Fellow of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, is a linguist with numerous publications on linguistic diversity, multilingualism, language death, language revitalization, language change and contact. One of her books, Vanishing Voices, The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford University Press), co-authored with Daniel Nettle, won the British Association for Applied Linguistics Book of the Year Prize and has been translated into many languages. This book tells the story of the decline of languages and explains why the loss of linguistic diversity is part of the larger picture of near-total collapse of the worldwide ecosystem. Her most recent research examines the interface between biodiversity, linguistic diversity and poverty. She was a member of the Expert Group that produced UNESCO’s position paper on Education in a Multilingual World (Paris, 2003), and wrote the backgrounder paper on Languages and Cultural Identities for UNESCO’s report Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue (Paris, 2009).