The following is just a short account of an early contribution to the engagement of linguists in the area of language endangerment.
The XIVth International Congress of Linguists took place in August 10 - 15, 1987 in Berlin. During the congress, I was approached by Johannes Bechert, professor of general linguistics at the University of Bremen. He explained to me the situation of endangerment of languages in the world (a thought that I do not remember to have entertained before that) and insisted that it was urgent that linguists did something about it. He thought that the International Congress of Linguists was the proper forum to start some relevant action.
We agreed that a useful move would consist in the following: Formulate a succinct text about the topic, turn it into an appeal to the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes (CIPL) to take long-term action, append a collection of signatures made among congress participants to this text and hand it over to the Executive Committee of CIPL.
I formulated such a text. At the time, I had no technical equipment at my disposal, so I wrote it by hand. In the next few congress days, I gathered signatures among congress participants. Many internationally well-known linguists of the epoch, among them several who had never, to my knowledge, occupied themselves with the problem, signed the appeal. All in all, the number of signatures under the document was, as far as I remember, between 200 and 250.
On the last congress day, I approached Profs. Robert H. Robins, President, and Eugenius M. Uhlenbeck, Secretary General of CIPL. (Both of them had, in their earlier days, published a description of a Non-Indo-European language). I handed the document over to them with a few explanatory words. Neither of them ever contacted me again on the topic. However, four years later they published a collective volume titled Endangered languages. And from then on, preoccupation with language endangerment has continually been on the agenda of CIPL and of the International Congress of Linguists.
After the congress, Johannes Bechert and I founded a working group on endangered languages. In 1992, this evolved into the Arbeitsgruppe Bedrohte Sprachen of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS), from which again emerged, in 1997, the Gesellschaft für bedrohte Sprachen.
Erfurt, 06/03/2018 Christian Lehmann