Why this word is great
GLOTTOPHAGY — [Noun] The process by which a dominant language absorbs or supplants a minor language or dialect. From French glottophagie, coined by Louis-Jean Calvet, from the combining forms glotto- (from Greek glōtta, "tongue, language") and -phagy (from Greek -phagia, "eating", from phagein, "to eat"). Unlike "linguicide," which denotes a deliberate, often violent eradication, or the neutral "language shift," which lacks a critical connotation, glottophagy is a slow, metabolic consumption. It is the colonial ledger overwriting native place-names, the borrowed word displacing the native term until the original is forgotten, and the silent moment when a grandparent's untranslatable proverb dies on the lips of a child—a quiet catastrophe of consumption, not by malice, but by the mundane appetite of everyday use, leaving only the faint, bitter aftertaste of what has been digested and forgotten.