Babel receding...

Language extinction article at MSNBC. It's amazing that as the world's population grows the number of languages spoken decreases. It must be a strange and lonely feeling to be the last person alive to speak a language. You're the sole repository of an entire peoples' oral tradition. All the puns, the jokes that rely on particular inflection, all the history that a language tells about the people who spoke it: it's all in you and you alone. Does the last speaker of a language, when everyone else is gone, does that person feel pre-extinct?