2.8: Culture Under Pressure

Language Loss, Heritage, and the Fight to Remember

Globalization can make cultures more visible. It can also make them disappear. A language can gain new speakers because migrants or fans encounter it online; another can lose speakers because children are educated almost entirely in a dominant national or global language. A craft can find international buyers through social media while also becoming detached from the community that created it. A ritual can be documented globally while becoming less central to everyday life at home.

What happens when cultural change is not simply transformation?

What happens when something is at risk of being lost?

That question takes us from cultural diffusion to cultural survival.

What Does It Mean for a Culture to Be “At Risk”?

Cultures rarely disappear in one dramatic moment. More often, cultural loss happens gradually, through a weakening of transmission from one generation to the next. Fewer children learn a language well enough to speak it comfortably. Fewer young people have opportunities to apprentice with a craftsperson. A ceremony that was once part of community life is performed less frequently. Knowledge about plants, water, weather, farming, hunting, or healing remains with older generations but is not fully passed onward. This makes cultural loss difficult to recognize while it is happening. A tradition may still exist, but perhaps only a handful of people know how to practice it. A language may still have speakers, but few of them may be children. A craft may still be displayed in museums or sold to tourists even though fewer community members know how to make it. The question is therefore not simply whether something still exists. It is whether people retain the ability to carry it forward.

UNESCO uses the term intangible cultural heritage to describe living cultural practices including oral traditions, performing arts, rituals, social practices, knowledge about nature, and traditional craftsmanship. Importantly, UNESCO’s framework does not imagine these traditions as objects that must remain permanently unchanged. Intangible cultural heritage is continually recreated by communities as they respond to their environments, histories, and changing circumstances (UNESCO, 2003). That distinction matters. Safeguarding culture does not mean embalming it. A culture is not alive because it looks exactly as it did one hundred years ago. It is alive because people continue to know it, practice it, debate it, modify it, and pass it onward.

Language Is More Than Vocabulary

It is easy to think of a language as a collection of words that can be translated into another collection of words. If that were all language contained, language loss would be unfortunate but relatively simple: preserve a dictionary, record the pronunciation, translate the stories, and much of what mattered would remain. Languages carry much more than vocabulary. They contain humor, metaphors, oral histories, family relationships, religious concepts, political memories, ecological knowledge, social expectations, and ways of describing experiences that may not map neatly onto another language. The words people use for relatives can reveal how a society understands kinship. Terms for landscapes, plants, animals, seasons, or water can preserve knowledge accumulated through generations of living in a particular environment. Stories and jokes can depend on sounds, references, or double meanings that disappear when translated.

For that reason, the disappearance of a language involves more than losing a communication system. It can also weaken a particular way in which generations have interpreted and organized experience.

Scholarship on endangered languages emphasizes that survival depends heavily on intergenerational transmission. Languages remain strong when people have reasons and opportunities to use them in ordinary life, not merely when they appear in dictionaries or archives. Schools, families, governments, workplaces, media systems, religious institutions, and community organizations can all influence whether a language remains socially useful and culturally meaningful (Fishman, 1991; Grenoble & Whaley, 2006).

A language survives because people speak it to one another.

Languages Usually Do Not “Just Die”

When a language begins disappearing, explanations often focus on individual choices. Young people supposedly lose interest. Parents supposedly stop teaching it. People move to cities. A dominant language simply becomes more useful. Those explanations may describe what happened, but they do not necessarily explain why. Language shift frequently has a history of power behind it. Colonial governments imposed imperial languages on colonized populations. Schools have punished or shamed children for speaking Indigenous or minority languages. Nation-building projects have promoted a single national language as a symbol of unity while treating linguistic diversity as backward, divisive, or inconvenient. Employers have rewarded fluency in dominant languages. Courts, universities, bureaucracies, and media institutions have often operated primarily through the languages of politically powerful groups. Under those conditions, language choices become connected to survival and opportunity. Parents may encourage children to speak a dominant language because it provides greater access to education or employment. Migrant parents may reduce the use of a heritage language because they fear their children will experience discrimination or because they want them to integrate successfully into a new society. These decisions can be perfectly rational. That is precisely why the politics surrounding language loss matter. If one language provides access to education, employment, government, media, and social status while another is stigmatized or excluded from public life, the choice between them is not entirely free. Families make decisions inside systems they did not create. Languages therefore rarely “just die.” They are often pushed toward the margins long before the final generation stops speaking them.

The Schoolroom Can Be a Cultural Battleground

Imagine entering school as a child who speaks one language with parents and grandparents, only to discover that another language dominates the classroom. Teachers use it. Textbooks use it. Tests use it. Successful students are expected to master it. Perhaps your home language is tolerated. Perhaps it is ignored. In harsher systems, it may be actively discouraged or punished.

Even without an explicit prohibition, the message can become clear. One language is associated with education, professionalism, intelligence, and modernity. The other belongs at home.

Now extend that message across several generations.

Grandparents speak the heritage language fluently because it was the language of everyday life. Their children understand it but become more comfortable in the dominant language because that is what they use in school and work. The next generation understands conversations but responds in the dominant language. Their children know greetings, food names, affectionate expressions, perhaps a song or two.

No single family member decided to destroy the language. Yet the chain of transmission gradually broke.

This is one reason language revitalization movements often focus heavily on children. Documentation matters, but a language cannot survive primarily as material preserved for scholars. Children need opportunities to hear it, speak it, make mistakes in it, play in it, argue in it, text in it, learn mathematics in it, make jokes in it, and eventually raise another generation in it. Revitalization succeeds most meaningfully when the language returns to life rather than merely to the archive (Fishman, 1991; Hinton et al., 2018).

Prestige Can Kill Quietly

Not every language shift begins with a government prohibition or a teacher punishing a child. Sometimes prestige does much of the work. One language becomes associated with rural life while another represents urban opportunity. One belongs in the household while another belongs in universities and professional settings. One appears in international entertainment, science, technology, and business. The other may be spoken primarily by older relatives or within a geographically limited community. Over time, people learn which language appears to open doors. Parents may then decide that emphasizing the dominant language will give their children greater opportunities. They may be correct. A child who speaks the nationally or globally dominant language may have access to more schools, employers, media, and social networks. The problem is not the parent’s decision. The deeper problem is the unequal system surrounding it. A society creates enormous pressure toward language shift when cultural continuity appears to compete with economic mobility. That is why prestige can be such a powerful force. A language does not need to be officially banned if people gradually learn that speaking it carries fewer rewards, less recognition, or greater stigma.

Global Languages: Problem or Opportunity?

Global languages bring enormous benefits. Shared languages allow scientists to collaborate across borders, diplomats to negotiate agreements, migrants to navigate new societies, students to study internationally, businesses to trade, and people who grew up thousands of miles apart to speak directly to one another. The existence of widely shared languages is not itself the problem.

Nor is multilingualism a threat to cultural diversity. Human beings are perfectly capable of speaking more than one language, and multilingual societies have existed throughout history. A person can communicate internationally in one language while maintaining family, community, or regional life in another. The problem arises when institutions effectively require people to trade one language for the other.

If a child can receive a strong education only by abandoning a heritage language, or if professional advancement requires that a minority language disappear from public life, then linguistic integration comes at an unnecessary cultural cost. The goal does not have to be isolation from global communication. It can instead be additive multilingualism: gaining linguistic opportunities without treating an existing language as something that must be discarded.

The important question, then, is not whether societies should have global languages. They already do. The question is whether governments, schools, workplaces, media systems, and communities make it possible for people to participate in global life without surrendering linguistic diversity.

Diaspora Languages: Use It or Lose It?

Migration creates especially complicated conditions for language transmission. First-generation migrants may arrive in a new country speaking their heritage language fluently because it was the language of childhood, schooling, family, or community life. Their children grow up in a different linguistic environment. They may understand the heritage language but prefer the language spoken at school and among friends. By the third generation, fluency may decline sharply. The pattern can seem almost predictable. Grandparents speak. Parents understand. Children know greetings, affectionate phrases, curse words, and the names of foods. But diaspora language loss is not inevitable. Diaspora communities create institutions specifically designed to keep languages in circulation. Weekend schools teach reading and writing. Religious institutions provide spaces where heritage languages remain socially meaningful. Grandparents maintain relationships with grandchildren through video calls. Parents establish household rules about which language is spoken at home. Musicians, comedians, writers, podcasters, and online creators deliberately incorporate heritage languages into contemporary cultural forms. These efforts illustrate one of the recurring contradictions of globalization. Migration can weaken the everyday environment that sustained a language, yet globalization also provides technologies and transnational networks that allow speakers separated by geography to remain connected. A child growing up thousands of miles from a parent’s country of origin can now hear relatives speaking the language every week, watch entertainment produced in it, communicate with cousins, follow creators, listen to music, and encounter communities of speakers online. Globalization produces some of the pressure. It can also become part of the solution.

The Internet Can Kill a Language and Save One

Digital life creates another powerful linguistic hierarchy. Large languages usually have enormous online ecosystems. Users can search, shop, stream, play games, use voice assistants, read news, access government information, and communicate through thousands of applications without leaving the language. Smaller languages may have none of that infrastructure.

If a young person cannot easily type a language on a phone, search for information in it, find entertainment in it, or communicate with friends through it, the language becomes increasingly disconnected from important parts of everyday life. Digital invisibility can therefore intensify language shift. A language may survive in conversations with grandparents while disappearing from the spaces where younger generations spend much of their time. But digital technology can also be turned in the opposite direction.

Communities can record elders, build dictionaries, create searchable archives, develop fonts and keyboards, produce podcasts, subtitle videos, create language-learning applications, host virtual classes, build social-media communities, and connect speakers scattered across different countries. A language that once depended almost entirely on geographic proximity can acquire a transnational digital community. This does not mean technology automatically saves endangered languages. A language app cannot substitute for a community of speakers, and a digital archive cannot recreate everyday conversation by itself. Technology is a tool whose cultural consequences depend on how communities use it. The internet can contribute to linguistic disappearance. It can also give communities new tools for refusing it.

Revitalization

Language revitalization refers to deliberate efforts to strengthen a language that has lost speakers or has disappeared from important areas of everyday life. The goal may involve increasing the number of speakers, expanding the settings in which the language can be used, reconnecting younger generations with older speakers, or rebuilding institutions that allow the language to function beyond ceremonial occasions.

Successful revitalization therefore involves more than teaching vocabulary. Communities may establish immersion schools, language nests for young children, adult education programs, teacher-training programs, community classes, radio stations, television programming, public signage, music, digital content, dictionaries, and new terminology for contemporary life.

The emphasis on contemporary life is important. If a language can describe traditional ceremonies but not school assignments, technology, popular music, relationships, humor, politics, or ordinary teenage life, young speakers may still find themselves moving constantly into another language.

The Māori and Hawaiian revitalization movements demonstrate that language decline is not always irreversible. Both have relied heavily on community activism and educational institutions designed to restore intergenerational transmission, although revitalization remains difficult, politically contested, and incomplete (Hinton et al., 2018).

A revitalized language does not need to return to exactly the form it had before decline began. It needs speakers who can carry it somewhere new.

Documentation Is Not Transmission

Imagine that researchers make an extraordinary record of an endangered language. They record fluent speakers. They document grammar. They collect stories. They create a dictionary. They preserve songs, conversations, oral histories, and pronunciation in a digital archive. Something enormously valuable has been accomplished. But the language can still stop being spoken. That distinction sits at the heart of cultural preservation. Documentation preserves evidence that a cultural practice existed and can provide resources for future learning. Transmission keeps the practice moving from one person and one generation to another. UNESCO’s safeguarding framework therefore includes documentation but also emphasizes education, protection, transmission, and revitalization (UNESCO, 2003). A recording of a ceremony is not the same thing as a community continuing to perform it. A photograph of a craft is not the same thing as an apprentice learning to make it. A dictionary is not the same thing as a grandparent speaking to a child. Documentation preserves evidence. Transmission preserves practice. Both matter. They are not the same thing.

Heritage Is Alive

Intangible cultural heritage is sometimes discussed as though communities inherit sealed packages from the past and their responsibility is to prevent anything inside from changing. Living culture does not work that way. A weaving technique can incorporate new materials. A festival can move to a new location. A food tradition can change when ingredients become unavailable. A storytelling tradition can move from an evening gathering to a podcast. A community may modify a ceremony because its members now live across several countries. Traditional ecological knowledge can adapt as ecosystems themselves change. A weaving technique, dance, festival, food tradition, storytelling practice, ceremony, way of managing water, body of medicinal-plant knowledge, or traditional boatbuilding technique can all constitute living cultural heritage. What makes them living is precisely the fact that people continue practicing and interpreting them.

Research on traditional ecological knowledge similarly emphasizes that such knowledge is not simply an archive of facts from the past. It develops through relationships among people, communities, and environments and continues adapting as those relationships change (Berkes, 2018). A tradition therefore does not become fake simply because it changes. The greater danger appears when communities lose the ability, resources, place, or authority to decide how the tradition changes themselves.

The UNESCO List Problem

International recognition can be extremely valuable for cultural survival. A tradition recognized as important heritage may receive funding, publicity, educational support, government protection, or renewed interest among younger generations. Recognition can also give communities leverage when arguing that a cultural practice deserves institutional support. But recognition can change the thing being recognized. Once a tradition becomes internationally famous, tourists may arrive specifically to see it. Governments may incorporate it into national branding campaigns. Businesses may reproduce its visual elements. Performances may be scheduled around visitor seasons. Particular versions of a tradition may become standardized because those are the versions institutions officially recognize. A practice that once existed primarily within community life can begin functioning simultaneously as heritage, tourist attraction, national symbol, cultural commodity, and international spectacle. None of these outcomes automatically destroys the tradition. New visibility may provide precisely the resources needed for its continuation. Yet visibility also creates new audiences, incentives, and authorities. This creates the UNESCO List problem: recognition may help preserve a cultural practice while simultaneously helping transform what is being preserved. The question is not simply whether a tradition receives international attention. It is whether the people who created and maintain it retain meaningful control over what that attention does.

When Heritage Becomes a Tourist Attraction

Tourism can provide powerful economic support for cultural practices. Visitors purchase crafts, attend performances, hire local guides, stay in community-owned accommodations, visit workshops, take classes, and pay for cultural experiences. Income from tourism can make it economically possible for people to remain in a craft or performance tradition that might otherwise be difficult to sustain. But markets also send signals. Visitors may prefer one style of craft over another. A particular dance may attract larger audiences. A ceremony may be too long for a tour itinerary. A complicated story may be difficult to explain in fifteen minutes. Objects may need to become smaller, cheaper, lighter, or more decorative in order to sell.Slowly, cultural practices can begin adapting around the expectations of outsiders.

Again, adaptation itself is not necessarily the problem. Cultural traditions have always responded to changing environments and audiences. The more important Global Studies question is who controls the adaptation. If community members decide how to modify a performance while maintaining meanings they consider important, that is very different from an outside tourism company demanding changes because a more photogenic version sells better.

The issue is therefore not authenticity versus change. It is agency within change.

Frozen in Time

Minority and Indigenous cultures often encounter an especially unfair version of the authenticity test. They are expected to remain visibly connected to an imagined traditional past in order to be considered culturally legitimate. A community uses smartphones? Perhaps outsiders say it has become too modern. An artist experiments with synthetic materials? Not traditional enough. An Indigenous musician combines an ancestral language with hip-hop? Someone questions whether the music is authentic. A traditional craftsperson changes a design for contemporary use? The object may suddenly be treated as less culturally pure. Dominant cultures are rarely subjected to the same standard. No one claims that American culture ceased to exist when people stopped riding horses to work or that French culture became inauthentic when French musicians began using electronic instruments. Powerful cultures are generally allowed to change without having their legitimacy questioned. Expecting marginalized cultures to remain frozen in an earlier historical moment is therefore not neutral respect for tradition. It can reproduce a colonial idea that Indigenous or minority peoples belong primarily to the past. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognizes Indigenous peoples’ rights to maintain, control, protect, and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and cultural expressions (United Nations, 2007). The word develop matters alongside maintain and protect. Cultural survival requires the freedom to continue becoming something.

Who Gets to Preserve Whom?

Museums, universities, archives, governments, and researchers often possess resources that communities facing cultural loss may not have. They can fund fieldwork, digitize materials, maintain climate-controlled archives, record endangered languages, preserve photographs, and make cultural materials accessible to future generations. Those resources can be invaluable but preservation immediately raises questions about authority. Who owns the recording once an interview has been archived? Who determines whether sacred or private material can be viewed publicly? Who writes the description attached to an object? Who decides which spelling of a community name appears in a catalog? Who controls photographs taken decades earlier? Who can reproduce them in a book, exhibition, or commercial project?

These are not minor administrative questions. They determine whether preservation supports community authority or transfers authority elsewhere.

Work on Indigenous data sovereignty and governance has increasingly emphasized that information about Indigenous peoples should not simply be treated as material available for unrestricted institutional control. The CARE Principles, for example, emphasize collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics when Indigenous data are collected and governed (Carroll et al., 2020). Related scholarship on Indigenous data sovereignty asks institutions to reconsider who should determine how knowledge about communities is collected, stored, interpreted, and reused (Kukutai & Taylor, 2016). Preservation without community authority can become another form of extraction. A culture survives in an archive, but the people whose culture it is may lose control over the archive.

Museums Are Changing Too

Museums grew historically through systems that often placed institutions in the role of authoritative preservers and interpreters. Objects arrived in collections through archaeology, purchase, donation, colonial administration, scientific expeditions, missionary activity, and sometimes outright coercion or theft. Once inside the museum, specialists determined how objects would be classified, displayed, described, conserved, and interpreted.

Those practices are increasingly being challenged.

Many museums and archives are reconsidering relationships with source communities and experimenting with collaborative curation, consultation, repatriation, community access, shared authority, and restrictions on materials that communities consider sacred or culturally sensitive. These changes are uneven and often contested, but they represent a meaningful shift in how preservation itself is understood.

The emerging principle is deceptively simple: preserving culture should not mean institutions speaking for communities whenever communities can speak for themselves.

Museums are increasingly shifting from preserving culture for communities toward preserving culture with communities.

That preposition matters because it changes who possesses authority.

The Last Speaker Problem

Stories about endangered languages often become most visible when journalists announce that only a few fluent speakers remain. The “last speaker” provides a dramatic image of cultural loss: one person seemingly carrying an entire linguistic world.

But by the time a language reaches its last speaker, the central crisis occurred decades earlier.

The crucial moment may have been when children stopped learning the language at home, when schools shifted entirely to another language, when families migrated away from their communities, when employment required use of a dominant language, or when discrimination made speakers reluctant to pass the language to their children.

Focusing only on the final speaker can therefore make language loss appear mysterious and inevitable. A better Global Studies approach moves backward through the story.

What happened to education? What happened to land? Did people migrate voluntarily or under pressure? Which languages were rewarded in employment? Was the language recognized by the government? Could speakers use it in schools, courts, media, or public services? Did parents fear their children would face discrimination for speaking it?

Once those questions are asked, language loss begins to look less like cultural accident and more like social history.

The final speaker is not the beginning of the story. They are one of its last chapters.

Heritage and Climate Change

Cultural practices do not exist somewhere outside the physical world. They are practiced in particular landscapes, ecosystems, seasons, waters, forests, coastlines, and communities. Climate change therefore threatens cultural heritage as well as infrastructure and ecosystems. Rising seas may threaten culturally significant coastal places. Wildfires can damage landscapes central to ceremonial practices. Changing rainfall patterns can disrupt agricultural traditions. Species migration or decline can affect hunting, fishing, gathering, and medicinal knowledge. Displacement can separate communities from places where knowledge has historically been practiced. Traditional ecological knowledge makes this connection especially visible because cultural knowledge often develops through long relationships with particular environments (Berkes, 2018). If the timing of seasons changes, species disappear, or people are forced from ancestral territories, the knowledge associated with those environments may become harder to practice and transmit. Indigenous climate scholarship has emphasized that climate change cannot be separated from longer histories of colonialism, dispossession, and environmental transformation. Communities may therefore confront new climate pressures on top of older disruptions to land and cultural continuity (Whyte, 2018). Culture lives somewhere. When place changes, culture changes with it.

Who Decides What Is Worth Saving?

Not everything receives equal preservation. Some endangered languages receive government funding while others receive almost none. Some historic buildings are restored at enormous expense while other culturally significant places disappear. Some archives are digitized. Some remain in boxes. Some traditions are taught in schools, promoted internationally, and celebrated as national heritage. Others receive little recognition. That raises an uncomfortable question: Who decides? Heritage may appear to be something societies simply inherit, but institutions continually select which parts of the past deserve official recognition. Governments designate monuments. Museums choose what to collect. UNESCO recognizes particular forms of heritage. Universities determine which languages and histories receive scholarly attention. Tourism boards decide which traditions represent a destination. Selection inevitably reflects power. A practice associated with a politically dominant group may be treated as national heritage, while a practice associated with a marginalized group may be described as regional, ethnic, informal, or even backward. A state may enthusiastically celebrate Indigenous clothing while resisting Indigenous political claims to land or autonomy. A government may promote a minority dance for tourism while failing to support the language in which its songs were originally performed. Heritage is therefore never simply discovered. It is also selected, and selection is an exercise of power.

Cultural Survival Is Not Cultural Stasis

The language of preservation can accidentally create the impression that the ideal cultural tradition is one that never changes. But unchanged culture is usually dead culture. A living language invents words for new technologies and experiences. A living musical tradition experiments with new instruments and genres. A living craft responds to different materials and markets. A living food tradition changes as people migrate and ingredients become available or unavailable. A living community argues about what tradition means and which parts should be carried forward. Cultural survival is therefore not a project of returning communities to an imaginary moment before globalization. Such a moment may never have existed anyway. Cultures have always encountered neighbors, migrants, technologies, political changes, environmental shifts, and new ideas. The key issue is agency.

Can communities continue transmitting cultural knowledge? Can they determine which elements they want to maintain, which they want to change, and which they may choose to abandon? Do they possess the land, resources, institutions, legal authority, and social space necessary to make those decisions? UNESCO’s understanding of intangible cultural heritage as continually recreated supports this more dynamic approach to safeguarding (UNESCO, 2003). Cultural continuity does not require perfect repetition. It requires the capacity to carry meaningful practices forward. A better definition of preservation is therefore not “Keep everything exactly the same.” It is: Keep communities able to carry it forward.

The Cultural Survival Test

When a government, museum, international organization, tourism program, university, nonprofit, or community announces that it is preserving a culture, the existence of a preservation program tells us relatively little by itself. The more revealing questions concern what happens to the people who actually practice the culture. Are younger generations learning the language, craft, ceremony, ecological knowledge, or artistic practice? Do they have enough time and economic security to learn it? Do teachers and elders have resources to transmit it? Does the community still have access to the land, water, plants, animals, buildings, or sacred places required for the practice?

Then ask about authority. Who decides how the tradition changes? Who controls recordings, archives, photographs, and data? Who decides what can be shared publicly and what should remain private? Does commercialization provide resources to practitioners, or do outsiders capture most of the economic value? Language matters too. Can the tradition continue within its own linguistic framework, or is it increasingly interpreted only through a dominant language? Technology can present the same kind of double edge. Does it create new possibilities for transmission, or does digital exclusion accelerate disappearance?

The final question may be the most important: Is the culture allowed to evolve? A preservation effort that keeps objects intact while removing community control may conserve evidence without sustaining culture. A stronger approach protects the ability of communities to transmit, govern, reinterpret, and develop their own cultural practices. That is the difference between preserving something about a community and supporting cultural survival.

Global Studies Lens: Follow the Disappearance

When someone explains cultural loss by saying, “Young people just aren’t interested anymore,” that should be the beginning of the analysis, not the conclusion. Ask what happened before the loss of interest.

Was there colonization? Did schools change language policies? Were people displaced or encouraged to migrate? Did economic opportunities move elsewhere? Did discrimination make a cultural practice embarrassing, dangerous, or economically costly? Did people lose access to land or culturally important ecosystems? Did tourism transform a practice into something primarily performed for outsiders? Did the language fail to develop a significant digital presence? Then move one step deeper. Who had the power to create those conditions?

That is where cultural disappearance becomes a Global Studies problem. What initially appears to be an individual cultural preference may actually sit at the intersection of political authority, economic incentives, migration, colonial history, environmental change, education policy, technology, and global markets. People do sometimes decide that they no longer want to continue a cultural practice, and communities have the right to make that choice. Cultural survival should not become another demand imposed from outside. But we should be cautious about describing cultural disappearance as free choice when the available choices were structured by inequality. Follow the disappearance far enough and you often find power.

Think About It!

Choose an endangered language, threatened cultural practice, or revitalization movement. Investigate not simply what is disappearing but why. Then ask: Is the goal to preserve the past, or to make it possible for the culture to have a future?