Sir

Your News Feature “Tongue tied” (Nature 438, 148–149; 2005), drawing attention to endangered languages, was very welcome, but in focusing on US research it overlooked the main work done in this area.

By far the largest investments in endangered-language research have been made by European institutions rather than US ones. Consider, for example, the ongoing investment by the Volkswagen Foundation ($12.75 million and still rolling) and the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund ($34 million invested through the School of Oriental and African Studies, London).

Even the research on the Siberian language Tofa that was reported in your News Feature was undertaken with Volkswagen funding: it is part of 5 terabytes of data now archived in http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

In general, I believe that Nature's coverage of language and linguistics is relatively poor — a shame, as this is arguably the most advanced area of research in the humanities and it is developing fast.