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At the dawn of this new millennium, it is no longer necessary, as it was in the thirteenth century, to posit an imaginary traveler able to traverse all of the continents. Today, many people move around the world with ease and speed, spanning in a matter of hours the distances that it took Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta years to cover. Even those who do not travel still have the wider world brought into their homes via books, newspapers, televisions, and computers. Consider two very different, contemporary, settings: a fishing village in the Amazon River basin and the cosmopolitan sprawl of Los Angeles. Picture a sixty-four-year-old fisherman in an Amazonian village trying to teach his eleven children their parents’ tongue, Cocama-Cocamilla, but to no avail. All his kids speak Spanish instead. "I tried to teach them," he notes. "It’s like paddling against the current." Seven centuries ago, over 500 languages were spoken in the Amazon River basin. Today, only 57 languages survive there; and probably around half are doomed to extinction. Evidently, one effect of globalization is to reduce global diversity. But globalization can also lead to increasing local diversity. For example, Los Angeles, once the emblem of white, suburban America, today has become a cacophonous city of over 100 languages, from Hmong to Russian to Spanish.
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