A language is said to be dead or extinct when no one speaks it any more. Crystal (2002) explains that languages with only one speaker are already dead languages for language is considered alive only as long as there is someone to speak it to. He refers to implicit and explicit role of in extinction of Australian indigenous language and states that “in Australia, the presence of English has, directly or indirectly, caused great linguistic devastation, with 90% of languages moribund” (p. 87). Holmes (2008), on the contrary, believes that “many of Australian indigenous languages disappeared as a direct massacre of the aboriginal people or their death from diseases introduced by Europeans” (p. 58). As an example she refers to Tasmanian indigenous language which was exterminated with the death of its speakers. Even if accepting in Australia the dominance of English killed minority languages, this cannot be the basis for generalization. There were some extinct or disappeared minority languages which had never been exposed to English but disappeared (Holmes, 2008; Crystal, 2002). As in Latin America Crystal (2002) expounds that “English is not the language which is dominant throughout Latin America: if languages are dying there, it is not through any 'fault' of English” (p. 59). The death of a language is not a social, cultural and linguistic concern. Ecolinguistics as a new paradigm of linguistic research equals linguistic loss as a symbol of a crisis of biodiversity by putting special emphasis on indigenous languages. They maintain that a wealth of ecological information will be lost as the language is lost. This school of thought regards saving endangered languages as an important part of the larger challenge of preserving biodiversity. For example, according to Keebe (2003) loss of a language is the permanent, irrevocable loss of a certain vision of the world and is comparable to the loss of an animal or a plant. Languages die not just for one reason but due o mixture of reasons. Draw on studies (Holmes, 2008; Crystal, 2002) there seems to be three general reasons for death of minority languages; physical damage to people (can include either massacre or epidemic), active antipathy to individual languages, globalisation and assimilation of one culture within a more dominant culture. The role of English as the dominant language cannot be traced in first and second reasons; moreover the second reason seems to be a personal choice. But the last reason, which according to Crystal (2002) is the biggest reason and encompasses range of areas, causes language shift and consequently gradual death for a minority language. In this sense it is necessary to differentiate between language death and language shift. Holmes (2008) explains difference between language shift and death maintains that “language shift generally refers to the process by which one language displaces in the linguistic repertoire of a community. A key word in this definition is “process” which implies as a series of actions, language shift happens in several steps and gradually.