The Language Next Door

The article “Listening to and saving the world’s languages” is about the diversity of languages that can be found right here in New York City. The article discusses the fact that linguists are now realizing that they didn’t need to go to remote locations all over the Earth to discover rare languages. Some of the languages they are looking for are already here in New York being spoken by many immigrant families. I never realized that the melting pot that is Queens had so many rare languages to be found.
I always assumed that most of the languages I heard on the train or in the street where fairly common languages. However, now that I think about it, perhaps there was a time when I heard someone speaking a language and it might have been a language that was never documented before. Or a language that some linguist professor has been trying find for many years. Is it possible that the two old men I sat next to on the train last week were the only speakers of the particular language they were using? This article makes me believe that it is. Why don’t the people who speak these rare languages teach it to younger generations? Or they themselves make it known that they’re language is dying and instead of having linguists look for them, they look for the linguists?