I have often criticized the literature on LEL for ignoring the need to also discuss what has enabled some languages to prevail over others and why some languages are resilient against their spread of these. The literature has been myopic in not showing interest in precedents of LEL in human history before the last half millennium of the Indo-European dispersal. Generally, it has not explained why these processes have been more frequent in settlement colonies than in others, especially trade and exploitation colonies, which in fact have produced new language varieties. The narrative according to which many more languages than today were spoken in Africa before the dispersal of Homo sapiens 80–30 kya is questionable. If the claim is true, then it certainly is not the last wave of the Indo-European dispersal that killed them. Besides, the literature has overlooked the story of several layers of language speciation around the world that is told in genetic linguistics. We should be talking about the balance sheet of language births and deaths in the history of humanity. Hence, we would learn more from discussing language vitality, more broadly, instead of focusing just on LEL, which is only one of the many folds of this non-structural aspect of language evolution. On the other hand, invocations of colonization alone do not explain the differential evolution of language vitality.