There are 6,809 languages spoken in the world today. Conservative estimates are that the world’s languages are currently dying at the rate of at least two languages each month, and linguists predict that most of today's languages will die out in the next 100 years. Since 1962, the author has been gathering field data on some of the smallest language groups in the world—the Philippine Negritos. This paper will explain why the thirty-plus Negrito languages in the Philippines are endangered, and what the projected future is for these numerically tiny postforaging societies in the 21 st century. The argument will be supported by a review of the population sizes, interethnic human rights problems, and the environmental destruction of the rainforests of these marginalized peoples. Thirty-two endangered Negrito languages There are between 100 and 150 languages spoken in the Philippines today. A fourth of these languages—thirty-two—are spoken by different Negrito ethnolinguistic populations scattered throughout the archipelago (Grimes 2000) 2 . They are considered to be the aborigines of the Philippines whose ancestors migrated into these islands over 20,000 years ago. In early Spanish times these Negrito peoples numbered 10% of the Philippine population, living by hunting, gathering and trading forest products with non-Negrito coastal peoples. The other 90% of the people were oriental-looking farmers, descendents of the early Austronesians who began migrating into the Islands much later, only about 5,000 years ago. Today the Negrito groups total some 33,000 people, comprising only 0.05% of the present national population. Clearly something has gone wrong with these tiny aboriginal foraging populations in the last 300 years (Bennagen 1977; Griffin and Headland 1994; Headland 1989; Eder 1987). All of these 32 Negrito groups speak endangered languages. Sixteen of these groups live in the Sierra Madre mountain range that extends north and south down the entire eastern side of Luzon Island. Each group speaks its own Austronesian language, which they call Agta. 3 Each Agta language (or dialect) is mutually intelligible with one or two of its closest neighboring Agta languages (see the Appendix). I briefly describe here the story of one of those 16 Agta groups.